JERUSALEM, Jan 9 (AFP) - The Palestinian presidential election, which exit polls reported was crushingly won Sunday by PLO chairman Mahmud Abbas, was marred in east Jerusalem by confusion over voter registration that prevented many Palestinians from casting their ballot.
There were no turnout figures available for the annexed Arab sector of the city, but officials and monitors feared many of the estimated 120,000 people eligible to vote there had not been able to do so.
"The problem was that many people didn't know where they were registered to vote, so they just turned up anywhere and were turned away after their names didn't appear on the voting lists," a source in former US president Jimmy Carter's delegation of monitors said.
The chaos in east Jerusalem stemmed from two problems, observers said.
Some registered voters did not find their names on the registries provided to the post offices where the polling took place, while some non-registered voters listed only on the civil registry were turned away despite a law authorising them to vote anywhere upon presenting their ID cards.
"Many people who had the right to vote and were carrying the appropriate documents were turned away in east Jerusalem... There was a lot of tension because nobody knew what to do," said Francis Wurtz, a member of the European parliament monitoring the vote.
Carter's intervention and a call by Palestinian negotiations minister Saeb Erakat on the central elections commission to solve the problem only yielded results very late in the day, as not enough copies of the civil registries were available.
"Jimmy Carter didn't actually broker a deal -- he brought the existing legislation to the attention of the post offices, the Israeli authorities and the central elections committee," the US source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"It was a complete mess and the CEC didn't follow the law by operating with both registries," Salah Zuheike, the head of Abbas' campaign in Jerusalem, told AFP from the Salaheddin central post office.
Scores of monitors and advisers started canvassing east Jerusalem neighbourhoods and offering transportation to polling stations in a last-ditch effort to boost the turnout.
"There are 17,000 people who can vote here and for the moment only 500 have cast a ballot," said an official in Jerusalem's Shuafat refugee camp seven hours after voting started.
There were no signs of any disruption to the vote, as had been feared after Jewish settler organisations had called for Israelis to hamper voting by clogging post offices to pay bills and buy stamps.
Several small groups of Jewish extremists tried to approach the post offices to hamper the vote but were quickly turned away by the security forces, who numbered around 1,500 in the eastern sector, Israeli police spokesman Gil Kleiman told AFP.
Two supporters from an Islamist party, who were urging voters to boycott the election, were detained by Israeli police.
Voting for the second-ever Palestinian presidential election started at 7:00 am (0500 GMT) in most polling stations across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and ended at 9:00 pm (1900 GMT), following a two-hour extension.
Exit polls released after the close of the ballots showed Abbas taking 66.3 percent of the vote while his nearest rival, independent Mustafa Barghuti, won 19.7 percent.
A second poll by Bir Zeit university gave Abbas an even bigger margin of victory with 66.1 percent of the vote to Barghuti's 18.1.
01/09/2005 21:00 GMT - AFP