Vote counting underway in Ivory Coast

 
Vote counting is underway in Ivory Coast after a contentious presidential election, with longtime incumbent Alassane Ouattara widely expected to win a fourth term.

Nearly nine million Ivorians were registered to vote on Saturday in a race that saw five contenders vying for the presidency, reports Al Jazeera.
Opposition heavyweights were not running for the post, however, as former President Laurent Gbagbo was barred over a criminal conviction and former Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam was disqualified for acquiring French citizenship.

Critics said the exclusion of key candidates gave Ouattara, 83, an unfair advantage and essentially cleared the way for him to secure another term in office.

Voter turnout was expected to be key, according to experts, as the opposition had called for a boycott of the election.
Reporting from the country's largest city, Abidjan, on Saturday evening, Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris said that turnout had increased significantly throughout the day.

"In the early hours of voting, we saw some kind of apathy. But as the day wore on, we saw numbers picking up across the city," Idris said. "And that's the same story that we've been hearing from other parts of the country."

None of Ouattara's four rivals represented an established party, nor did they have the reach of the governing Rally of Houphouetistes for Democracy and Peace (RHDP).

Agribusinessman and former Trade Minister Jean-Louis Billon, 60, hoped to rally backers from his former Democratic Party, while former First Lady Simone Ehivet Gbagbo, 76, was looking to garner votes from supporters of her ex-husband.

The left-wing vote, meanwhile, hung in the balance between Gbagbo and Ahoua Don Mello, a civil engineer and independent Pan-African with Russian sympathies.

Henriette Lagou Adjoua, one of the first two women to run for the presidency during the 2015 election, represented a centrist coalition, the Group of Political Partners for Peace.

At the Riviera Golf 1 Primary School in Abidjan, the atmosphere appeared calm as the first voters began to queue in the early hours of Saturday.