 ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) - Ethiopians voted Sunday in a first round of general elections that the opposition boycotted to protest alleged intimidation by ruling party officials.
The electoral board received no reports of irregularities or incidents before polls closed nationwide at 6 p.m., board official Tesfaye Mengesha said.
The board did not have an official turnout figure, but Tesfaye estimated it would be around 90 percent of Ethiopia's 26 million registered voters. The country's total population is around 80 million.
Governing coalition candidates are running virtually unchallenged after the main opposition coalition pulled out of the races. Some 4.5 million candidates are vying for nearly 4 million seats on neighborhood councils and in parliament. A second round of voting will be held April 20.
In deeply religious Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds lengthy, early morning Sunday services, some skipped their morning worship to cast ballots.
"It's a good government," Asrat Fanta, 43, said after voting for the ruling party.  However, Human Rights Watch predicted that the vote would not be fair, saying opposition candidates and voters were threatened, attacked and arrested during the run-up to the elections.
Ethiopia's largest coalition of opposition parties, the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces, said some 14,000 of its candidates were forced to drop out after being threatened or prevented from registering.
Another opposition group said its 3,000 or so candidates also dropped out in similar circumstances.
Its leader, Beyene Petros, said that if any of the opposition coalition's 6,000 remaining candidates win because their names remained on the ballots, printed before the boycott, they would withdraw.
Government and election officials denied the allegations and said they expect the vote to be Ethiopia's freest and fairest.
Ethiopia has struggled in the past with election irregularities and violence, notably in the aftermath of 2005 general elections when security forces killed 193 protesters.
Many voters appeared confident that this ballot would be trouble-free.
"Everything seems to be calm, and hopefully we will get a party that stands for the people," said Bezunesh Yimam, a 51-year-old teacher who said only that she was voting for a party that will provide "the right service that I've been deprived of." She would not elaborate.
Other voters were less hopeful.
Housekeeper Letarik Chane, 22, said she was still angry over the 2005 violence and decided to abstain from this year's vote.
"In the last election, I waited for a full day to vote and was really disappointed in the aftermath of the results," which opposition parties said were rigged to allow the ruling coalition to regain parliamentary control. "I do not want to repeat the same mistake again," she said. |