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Tens of thousands of police and polling officials in Zimbabwe began casting their ballots two days ahead of the July 31 general elections, when they will be needed on duty.
The Electoral Commission said about 87,000 people are expected to participate in the early voting at 209 polling stations nationwide.
At a polling station at Town House in Harare's central business district, a queue of about 150 officers had formed by 7 a.m. (500 GMT) Voting proceeded slowly but peacefully, as Xinhua reporters witnessed.
The elections will determine the president, more than 200 National Assembly members, and nearly 2,000 local councilors.
The race would mainly be a contest between veteran president Robert Mugabe and his long-time rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
The current coalition government between Mugabe and Tsvangirai was formed after disputed elections in 2008, during which Tsvangirai won the first round of the vote but the votes were not sufficient to make him an outright winner.
Mugabe won the run-off after Tsvangirai pulled out, citing widespread violence against his supporters. The 15-member regional bloc Southern Africa Development Community intervened and brokered the current coalition government.
PEACEFUL VOTE
Despite fears of a repeat of the violence in 2008, police chief spokesperson Senior Assistant Commissioner Charity Charamba said the run-up to this year's polls had been largely peaceful.
"We are more than ready for this election," Charamba told Xinhua. "We have received very few cases of violence and these are mostly minor cases. As police, we are managing."
Charamba did not disclose how many policemen would be deployed on the ground on July 31, citing confidentiality, but she said police constabulary, a reserve force, would be called up.
She cited the country's successful conduct of a constitutional referendum in March in which more than three million people nationwide voted peacefully to endorse a new constitution.
Mugabe, the country's leader since its independence from Britain in 1980, has also been preaching peace since long before the electoral process started earlier this year.
"Let us not fight," Mugabe told his supporters as he hit the campaign trail outside Harare this week, accusing his rival Tsvangirai's MDC-T party of initiating violence this time around trying to "discredit the election."
"We want peaceful elections, and peace everywhere," the 89-year-old president said.
SECURITY REFORMS
Tsvangirai's party on Friday raised fresh concerns of vote rigging, petitioning the court to stop the early vote by police. He said the ballots given to police far outnumbered the police forces on the government's payroll.
The ZEC has received 69,222 applications from the police forces and 70,000 forms were issued.
Charamba defended the arrangement, saying the extra ballot papers were needed as spares for those who made mistakes filling in the forms.
Zimbabwe's senior police and military forces are believed to have been loyal to Mugabe's Zanu-PF party, prompting Tsvangirai to call for "security reforms" before the elections.
The prime minister's party tried, but failed, to postpone the July 31 poll date to push through his proposed security reform agenda.
Mugabe brushed off the calls, saying it was his rival's tactic to delay elections over fears of "a sure poll defeat."
