Women in Saudi Arabia Vote for First Time in the Country’s History

In a historic day for Saudi Arabia, the women in the country for the first time will contest and vote in the elections to be held on Saturday.

There are around 130,000 women registered to vote in the country – still a small proportion against the registered male voters that are around 1.3 million.

Men and women began entering segregated polling stations across the country beginning at 8 a.m. local time Saturday when voting officially got under way.

The decision to allow women to vote was taken by the late King Abdullah who was keen for women to have a bigger public role.

The election is for 284 municipal councils with more than 900 women registered as candidates. Women candidates can’t address men directly, so have had to speak through male relatives or supporters, or speak from behind a partition and rely on projectors and microphones.

Municipal council elections are the only type of elections in which Saudi citizens can directly elect their representatives, and they’re quite rare.

Nasief said the election campaign was “not really” fair because of the segregation and a rule against any candidates publishing their own picture. While both genders were banned from publishing their photos under election rules, for women it was nearly impossible to meet voters.

“Recognising women’s votes in decision-making is a step towards equality”, she said. Some of them, in fact confessed that they are not contesting to win, but for the sheer spirit of participating.

Najla Khaled, a 24 year-old English literature major, described voting “as a huge step for women in Saudi”.

Voting in the first-ever elections open to women in Saudi Arabia has come to an end.

As many as 1,486,477 female and male voters were eligible to cast vote to choose 6,440 candidates in the municipal elections which closed at 05:00 p.m. Abdullah Al Maiteb made his way into a polling station in Riyadh Saturday morning, expressing a widely held sentiment about why women should not be on the ballot. They would need their help to reach the polling booth.

She said men and women were already mixing to a degree in the workplace, supermarkets and other locations, although restaurants, banks and other public places include separate sections for “families” and single men.

FILE – Saudi woman Fawzia al-Harbi, a candidate for local municipal council elections, shows her candidate biography at a shopping mall in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 29, 2015.

“It continues to happen in the context of wider discrimination against women, particularly the male guardianship system in which women have to, still, require permission for travelling overseas, to marry or to undertake higher education”, she said.

“Men and women have equal rights in many things”, she said, reciting a relevant verse from the Quran, and adding that everyone she encountered was supportive of her campaign.

The kingdom’s first municipal ballot in 2005 was for men only.