Millions of Nigerians turned out yesterday to vote in a presidential election that analysts say is too close to call between President Goodluck Jonathan and former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari.

Nearly 60 million people have cards to vote and determine the outcome of the first election in Nigeria’s history where an opposition candidate has a realistic chance of defeating a sitting president. The vote takes place amid an Islamic insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast in which thousands have been killed.

An electoral officer checks through names on a list at a polling unit at the start of the election in Daura. Photos: Reuters

Boko Haram extremists waving guns forced voters to abandon polling stations in three villages of northeastern Gombe state, witnesses said.

The militants have vowed to disrupt elections, calling democracy a corrupt Western concept.

Two car bombs exploded at two polling stations in south-central Enugu state but did not hurt voters, police said. Police detonated two other car bombs at a primary school in Enugu, said Enugu state police Commissioner Dan Bature.

Boko Haram has been blamed for many car bombings but was not immediately suspected in the southeastern blasts far from its northeast stronghold.

President Goodluck Jonathan denied the attacks, saying the governor of the state told him there were no blasts.

The official website of the Independent National Electoral Commission was hacked but was quickly secured, said officials who said the site holds no sensitive material.

Biometric cards and readers are being used for the first time to discourage the kind of fraud that has marred previous votes

Thousands of people forced from their homes by the Islamic uprising lined up to vote at a refugee camp in Yola, the northeast Adamawa state capital which is hosting as many refugees as its 300,000 residents.

The oil-rich and heavily populated south is deeply contested and has become a political battleground since the main opposition parties united in a coalition two years ago, causing dozens of defections from Jonathan’s party.

Polling stations opened late in most places. Voters registration was scheduled to start at 8am and still was ongoing in the afternoon, when voting was supposed to start. Men and women formed separate lines at many polling stations.

Earlier, officials rushed across the country delivering ballot materials by trucks, speedboats, motorcycles, mules and even camels, in the case of a northern mountaintop village, according to spokesman Kayode Idowu of the Independent National Electoral Commission.

Good humour turned to anger and altercations as people waited hours to be registered to vote, only to find that machines were not reading new biometric voting cards.

Even the President was affected. Three newly imported card readers failed to recognise the fingerprints of Jonathan and his wife.

He returned two hours later and was accredited without the machine using visual identification.

Biometric cards and readers are being used for the first time to discourage the kind of fraud that has marred previous votes. Afterward, Jonathan wiped sweat from his brow and urged people to be patient as he had, telling Channels TV: “I appeal to all Nigerians to be patient no matter the pains it takes as long as if, as a nation, we can conduct free and fair elections that the whole world will accept.”