Yemenis are voting in a poll that brings an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, with his deputy Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi guarantees election by virtue of being the sole candidate.

 

Yemeni VP the only candidate

Yemenis are voting in a poll that brings an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, with his deputy Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi guarantees election by virtue of being the sole candidate.

Voting began at 8:00 am (0500 GMT) in the referendum-like poll, with women were forming separate queues outside polling stations.
More than 12 million Yemenis are eligible to vote. These 12 million are the 10 million registered in the last elections in 2006 in addition to 2.2 million new voters.

The turnout in the single-candidate election will give some idea of the support 66-year-old Hadi has from his countrymen to lead the transitional period.

The poll is being boycotted by two major opposition groups; the separatist Southern Movement and the northern tribesmen of Huthis in Saada.

But the main proponents of the uprising that began in January 2011 have asked Yemenis to throw their support behind Hadi, whose posters have been plastered across buildings and throughout the streets of the capital Sanaa.

Tuesday's vote is the result of a power-transition deal brokered by Yemen’s Gulf neighbors in November after months of protests calling for Saleh’s removal.

The Gulf-brokered deal gave Saleh and his closest aides immunity from prosecution and made him honorary president.
It also stipulated that Hadi become the next president of Yemen for an interim two-year period.

SECURITY
Meanwhile, security situation was still tense on the eve of the poll. violence flared in the south, where separatists seek a divorce from the north with which they fought a civil war in 1994 after formal political union. Officials warned attacks to disrupt polling were all but certain.

An explosion rocked a polling station in the southern city of Aden on Monday. One soldier was killed and another injured as gunfire broke out after the blast, an official told Reuters news agency.

The vote has also been denounced by youth activists who took to the streets to demand the end of Saleh's rule, and regard the transfer plan as a pact among elite they regard as partners to the crimes of Saleh's tenure, including the killings of protesters in the uprising against him.