Ms Oteibi won a seat on the council in Madrakah in Mecca province, the president of the election commission, Osama al-Bar, told the official SPA news agency. She was running against seven men and two women, the report added.
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“It felt really good”, she said. Consequently, women who voted in the election had to be chaperoned to the booths on Saturday.
Council powers are restricted to local matters, including responsibility for streets, public gardens and rubbish collection.
Saudi Arabia, a monarchy, imposes a number of legal restrictions on women, including a ban on driving, compulsory veiling and the necessity of a male guardian to accompany a woman outdoors. Abdullah Al Maiteb made his way into a polling station in Riyadh Saturday morning, expressing a widely held sentiment about why women should not be on the ballot. During the campaign period, female candidates could not directly address male voters and had to either present their platforms from behind a partition, relying on projectors and microphones, or through male supporters and relatives presenting for them.
Though women make up just 10 per cent of registered voters, the right to simply cast a ballot sends a wider message to society, she said.
According to estimates 978 women and 5,938 men registered as candidates for the 3,159 seats at 284 municipal councils across the kingdom. “Around 130,000 were female, which was around 24% of the total”. Turnout was high, state media reported. “It doesn’t matter if I vote for a man or a woman”, said another northeastern resident, who gave her name only as Noura, 24. Ms Aljazi al-Hossaini waged her 12-day campaign largely over the Internet, putting her manifesto on her website, where both men and women could see it. “I did my best, and I did everything by myself”, said the 57-year-old management consultant, running in the Diriyah area on the edge of Riyadh.
Nassima al-Sadah, an activist in the eastern city of Qatif, said the voting process itself took place relatively smoothly, unlike the registration.
While many hailed the landmark event as a step forward for women’s rights in the country, critics say the modest step toward equality was merely symbolic. Saudi Arabia is the last country in the world to extend voting rights to women.
Ruled by the al-Saud family of King Salman, Saudi Arabia has no elected legislature and faces Western scrutiny of its rights record.
Huda al-Jeraisy, who as the daughter of a former head of the chamber of commerce in the conservative central part of the kingdom was seen by some Saudis as imparting an official stamp of approval on women’s candidature, won a seat in Riyadh.
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There were no elections in the 40 years between 1965 and 2005.
