It was a different story on Thursday, when Saudis in the Riyadh region voted in the country’s first nationwide elections. They had registration cards, voted behind privacy curtains, dropped ballots in boxes designed according to international standards and chose among candidates who ran Western-style campaigns, including posters, phone text messages and newspaper ads.

When voting began Thursday morning, election officials at one polling station in a middle-class neighborhood in northeastern Riyadh opened the long gray ballot boxes and held them up for reporters to see that they were empty. The officials then closed, locked and placed masking tape over the covers of the boxes. Voters waited in line outside the polling station’s door.

“This was a wonderful moment,” said Badr al-Faqih, a 54-year-old geography professor, moments after dropping the first vote into one of the ballot boxes. “This is a first step towards more elections.”

Al-Faqih said he would keep his green voter’s registration card “as a memento of this historic event.”

To prevent fraud, officials used a computer to scan registration cards to indicate the person had voted.

The first of the three-stage elections are only for half the country’s municipal councils, and women have been banned from voting and running although the election law does not deny them those rights. But it marks the first time that Saudis were taking part in a regular poll that conforms to international standards, offering them a real, though small, opportunity to participate in decision making in this absolute monarchy.

“Although such a step appears small and humble, it carries many implications, for it’s the first time that basic preparations for elections are held,” Labor Minister Ghazi Algosaibi told a news conference Wednesday. “These elections are a pioneering experience, the success of which will determine the following steps.”

More than 1,800 candidates were contesting 127 seats in the capital and surrounding villages on Thursday, with almost 700 of them running for seven seats in Riyadh. Only 149,000 out of 600,000 eligible voters have registered to vote. Two more phases will cover the rest of the country in March and April.

The candidates’ 12-day campaign, a first in the kingdom, brought enthusiasm to what had until then been a lackluster process. Campaigning ended Wednesday afternoon.

Women will be watching the polls from the fringes. Election officials have said they were excluded because there wasn’t time to prepare women only polling centers and most women do not carry ID cards. But others privately acknowledge that this mostly conservative society would not have accepted the notion of a woman voting or running.

Sheik Saleh bin Humaid, a cleric at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, said scholars are divided over the issue, with some supporting and others objecting to women’s involvement in elections.

Although women’s issues were almost absent from candidates’ platforms, many candidates were asked during daily gatherings with the public on whether they support women’s rights. Candidate Badr al-Suaidan tried to hedge the question Tuesday evening, but when an insistent guest demanded a yes or no answer, al-Suaidan answered affirmatively. It was a response that may have cost him some ballots among conservative voters.

Badriyah al-Bisher, one of several female columnists writing against the ban, said the government’s decision would “consolidate the inferior look that society gives them (women).”

She made an analogy between their exclusion and the ban on women’s driving.

“We’ve been dumped in the back seat again, and only a man is allowed to drive us,” she said.

With more than 1,800 candidates in the Riyadh region, it was hard to determine how many Islamists were running. Many candidates are wealthy businessmen and landowners who have poured millions into their campaigns in the hope that if they win they will be able to influence licensing for their businesses. If they lose, the campaign will have been good self promotion.

The powers of the councils are not clear, nor are their specific responsibilities. But analysts expect them to evolve into a conduit for public dissatisfaction, especially among poorer Saudis, that will bridge the information gap between the government and the people.

Algosaibi said others might judge the pace of reforms in the kingdom as too slow.

“(They) do not realize that the nature of societies itself is what should be the only criteria for the pace of change,” he said.

“What makes reform here slow is that Saudi Arabia has always been based on the principle of consensus. You have to wait for a viable consensus to reform before you go ahead,” he added.

Saleh al-Malik, a member of the elections commission and the Consultative Council, said there used to be elections in Saudi Arabia but the process was limited to big cities - Mecca and Western Saudi Arabia from 1937 until elections were introduced in Riyadh and other cities in the 1960s. The polls stopped in the early 1970s for reasons that are not clear.

Muhammad al-Mutlaq, 74, recalls voting in the eastern province more than 40 years ago.

Al-Mutlaq, who has registered to vote in the second stage of the elections next month, said there were no campaigns, no ads and no registration cards. Voters learned about a candidate’s intentions at a feast he hosted in his tent.

“He would have a banquet, feed the people, round them up in cars and take them to the municipality to vote for him,” al-Mutlaq said.

“We called that elections,” he said.