You won’t believe what Saudi Arabia has done with women now!

Out of 130,000 female registered voters, a staggering 106,000 – that’s roughly 82% – cast ballots in the Saudi Arabian elections on Saturday, General Election Commission spokesman Hamad Al-Omar told the Associated Press.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with some of the world’s tightest restrictions on women, including a ban on driving.

(MENAFN – Daily News Egypt) number of women have won seats on municipal councils in the first-ever Saudi election allowing female voters and candidates, officials and media say.

A woman has won a seat on a municipal council for the first time in Saudi Arabia, after the kingdom lifted its bar on women taking part in elections.

As a result, women accounted for less than 10 percent of registered voters and few female candidates were expected to be elected.

Saudi citizens require a ID card to vote, but it’s unclear how many woman have one according to Human Rights Watch. The British-educated architect, and now lecturer in architecture, was happy to chat unveiled in her Riyadh villa, wearing a tee-shirt reading “Punk’s Not Dead” – the epitome of a modern, internationally aware career woman.

In the coastal city of Jeddah, the atmosphere inside a girls’ school used as a polling station was jubilant.

The country’s strict public separation of sexes meant that during the campaign, female candidates could not directly address the majority of voters: men.

We are glad that finally Saudi Arabia which has been known as the most conservative nation for women has opened the gates of voting for women.

The right to vote was declared by the King Abdullah by royal decree in 2011.

Another woman won in Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad’s first mosque was built. Additionally, a woman won in Saudi Arabia’s southern border area of Jizan, another in Asir and two won in al-Ahsa.

Of the 6,917 candidates who contested the elections, 979 were women.

“We need to change the way people think about women”, Nassima al-Sada, an activist from the Eastern Province, told the Guardian as the elections approached.

This is a first for the deeply conservative society, where women are not even allowed to drive.

In 2013, he named women to the appointed Shura Council, which advises the cabinet.

Her daughter, Sahar Hassan Nasief, said the experience marked “the beginning” of greater rights for women in Saudi Arabia.