Incumbent Reported Leading in Nigeria Vote

Results from a watershed presidential election in Nigeria began to trickle in Sunday after the voting unfolded peacefully the day before — a first for a country with a history of rigged and violent votes in the 12 years since the end of military rule. News reports on Monday said the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, had secured a strong lead, prompting protests by his rival’s supporters in the north of the country.

Votes counted from all but one of Nigeria’s 36 states showed President Jonathan, from the southern oil producing Niger Delta, had beaten Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler from the Muslim north, in the first round, Reuters reported.

Nigerians have never voted before in such favorable conditions, analysts and election monitors said: ballot materials appear to have arrived on time, there were few reports of violence and the registration process before the voting on Saturday appeared to have gone smoothly.

The implications of the clean vote, for a new democracy still struggling to establish itself after years of dictatorship, are big. Analysts noted that the winner would most likely have a legitimacy denied to his predecessors elected under murky circumstances, including ballot stealing, a fraudulent polling list and the violent intimidation of voters, all features of the last presidential election, the widely denounced 2007 vote.

None of those flaws appeared to be a significant part of the electoral landscape on Saturday.

“It appears to be going quite smoothly,” said the leader of the National Democratic Institute’s observer mission, Joe Clark, a former Canadian prime minister, speaking from the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

“It’s gone in a quite orderly fashion,” he said, as large numbers of voters waited patiently. “Their numbers were called, and they queued up.”

Compared with earlier years, relatively few people, about 39, were killed in pre-election violence, according to the Election Situation Room, a Nigerian civil society group. There have been several bomb blasts as well, notably in the north, home to a militant Islamic sect. But the systematic manipulation that plagued previous elections appeared to be absent, experts said.

On Saturday, electoral officials were using an uncomplicated procedure for cutting down on fraud, Mr. Clark said. They were asking voters to remain near the polling places. “Their simple presence is supposed to deter what happened before,” he said. “The reason they are staying is to protect their vote.”

Their watchful eyes are credited with deterring fraud and their numbers are seen as preventing intimidation of voters and poll workers. In addition, President Jonathan is considered a credible candidate who is almost certain to be the eventual winner, although he could face a runoff. He has repeatedly called on his supporters to refrain from intimidation and acts of violence. Mr. Jonathan’s main opponent, Mr. Buhari, said Saturday that he would not contest the results of the vote.

Nigeria, which is America’s fourth biggest supplier of crude oil, Africa’s most populous country and home to major investments by American energy companies, is considered by the United States to be “one of the two most important countries in sub-Saharan Africa,” Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said in a conference call with reporters from Nigeria and elsewhere last month. The other major country usually cited is South Africa.

This year’s election was being closely watched by American officials because, despite shaking off military rule in 1999, Nigeria has maintained an ambiguous, less-than-democratic status, undermined by large-scale corruption, fraud and an elections agency that appeared to increase rather than combat those flaws.

Even more than the outcome, with Mr. Jonathan’s victory largely assumed, the process has been under scrutiny. Already, with Mr. Jonathan’s appointment of a respected political scientist, Attahiru Jega, last year to run the Independent National Electoral Commission, a will to reform appeared evident. Mr. Jega has received high marks for the expeditious cleaning of a voter list that included thousands of illegitimate names — of dead people and celebrities — using a computer registration system deployed at thousands of polling places in the vast country of 150 million, and taking electronic fingerprints of every voter.

Already, before Saturday’s vote, the parliamentary elections last week were “peaceful and credible in most parts of the country,” said Peter Lewis, a Nigeria expert at Johns Hopkins University. “This is the first poll they’ve had under a civilian administration where they’ve had a reasonable degree of organization,” Mr. Lewis said.