Scuffles broke out on Saturday as Ivory Coast held parliamentary elections, two months after 83-year-old Alassane Ouattara won a presidential ballot that extended his 14-year rule.
More than eight million people are registered to vote for members of the national assembly, where lawmakers from the ruling party currently hold a majority.
Elections in Ivory Coast are often marred by political tensions or violence.
More than 40,000 security force personnel who had been deployed for the presidential election in late October had been maintained for Saturday’s polls.
“There have been scuffles, but they were indeed brought under control by our law enforcement officers,” Ibrahime Kuibiert Coulibaly, the head of the independent electoral commission, told reporters.
“These incidents are so minor that they do not affect the proper conduct of the process,” he added, without giving details.
Ouattara, who won a fourth term in the presidential election, cast his own ballot earlier in Saturday’s legislative race.
Polling stations in the main city, Abidjan, opened an hour late in torrential rain.
“I’m here to elect my candidate so he can advance projects that support students’ entry into the workforce,” history student Assi Gilles Darus Aka, 21, told AFP.
He had come to vote at Notre Dame college in the Plateau district, where voters queued in a hall below a huge portrait of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the west African nation’s founding president.
At around midday, turnout at several voting stations in the Abidjan districts of Cocody and Yopougon was low.
At one Yopougon polling booth, only around 20 people had voted out of around 400 registered at that station.
“Sometimes you don’t see the elected officials, but I give them my trust because it’s my civic duty,” Dominique Tanou Benie, a 76-year-old retired IT specialist, said, casting a ballot at a school in Yopougon.
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