Saudi voters, finally including women, elect first women to local governing councils

On Saturday, women voted for the first time ever in Saudi Arabia, in the first election where women could run as candidates, and on Sunday, Saudi electoral authorities said that more than a dozen women had won seats on local councils. The 20 candidates who won, according to The Associated Press' tally, will serve on municipal councils in big cities and small villages, conservative regions and the cosmopolitan urban center Jeddah. The 284 local councils, the only elected bodies in the conservative kingdom, address municipal problems, often in an advisory role, and a third of the council seats are appointed by the government.

The election of women, and women's suffrage, were greeted as a big step forward in Saudi Arabia, but the 20 women will only make up less than 1 percent of the elected council members and women are still not allowed to drive or make important decisions about college, marriage, or travel without the legal consent of a male relative or guardian. Since men and women can't mix in public, most female candidates ran their council campaigns using social media. The General Election Committee barred the use of all candidates' faces in campaign materials, so as not to disadvantage the female candidates wearing burqas or other veils that cover their face.

About 106,000 out of 130,000 registered females cast ballots, according to the national electoral committee, compared with about 600,000 of Saudi Arabia's 1.35 million male registered voters. Among the women casting their ballots for the first time were three generations of women from the same family in Jeddah, with the oldest first-time voter 94-year-old Naela Mohammad Nasief. Her daughter, Sahar Hassan Nasief, enjoyed the new experience of voting. "I walked in and said 'I've have never seen this before. Only in the movies,'" she told AP. "It was a thrilling experience."

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