BRASILIA (AFP) - Brazilians voted in local elections for mayors and city councilors in a key mid-term test for leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Results for major cities and state capitals were expected around 9 pm (0001 GMT), while returns from 90 percent of the country were expected by 11 pm (0200 GMT), according to election officials.
Lula cast his ballot shortly after polls opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city where one of the most closely watched mayoral battles was being fought.
Marta Suplicy, from Lula's Workers' Party, was running against Jose Serra from the Brazilian Social Democratic Party.
Both candidates were tied with 40 percent of the vote, according to a voter exit poll by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics (IBOPE) -- meaning that they will go for a runoff election on October 31. An earlier poll put Serra comfortably ahead of Suplicy in a theoretical second round vote.
The election is a comeback effort for Serra, who lost the 2002 presidential race to Lula, but who is tipped as a possible contender in the next polls in 2006.
"A victory for Serra will demonstrate that the opposition is alive and well and the Workers' Party can't sell the idea of an automatic win for Lula," said political consultant Jose Luciano Dias.
Lula-backed candidates were winning handily in the state capitals of Belo Horizonte and Recife, acording to Ibope.
But in Rio de Janeiro, the country's second largest city, incumbent mayor Cesar Maia from the opposition Liberal Front Party seemed heading for reelection, according to exit polls.
Run-offs will be held in any of the 68 cities that have at least 200,000 registered voters where no candidate obtains an absolute majority in the first round.
Analysts will be measuring whether Lula's party benefited at the local level from his popularity and encouraging economic news, with an eye on his chances for re-election in 2006.
Lula came to power in January 2002 promising greater social justice and remains personally popular.
On becoming president, the former union firebrand answered the fears of international investors by establishing an austerity policy in a bid to control spending.
Brazil is on track for growth of four to five percent this year following a recession of 0.2 percent in 2003. Unemployment was trimmed from 13.1 percent in April to 11.4 percent in August.
Election day began smoothly, after a candidate was killed Saturday and a bomb was found outside Sao Paulo.
In the town of Redentora in Rio Grande do Sul state on the border with Uruguay and Argentina, city council candidate Antonio Euribides da Silva, 56, was shot and killed at dawn Saturday as he drove along a rural road outside of town, police said.
Da Silva, of the ruling Brazilian Democratic Movement coalition, was seeking a sixth consecutive term as city councilman. He has for the past 20 years been president of the town's rural workers union.
Another politician traveling with him at the time was unhurt.
And in the Sao Paulo port suburb of Santos, three sticks of dynamite wired to a detonator were found and disarmed in a small hotel, along with a crude map designating the local storage site for some of the electronic voting machines to be used in Sunday's election.
Voting is mandatory in Brazil. Results will be available quickly due to the use of 406,000 electronic voting machines in 359,326 polling stations.
Nearly 120 million voters were to cast ballots throughout the day for 5,563 mayors and more than 51,000 councilors.