By STEVENSON JACOBS
The Asso­ci­ated Press
Sun­day, Decem­ber 3, 2006; 9:37 PM

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haitians cast bal­lots Sun­day in munic­i­pal and local elec­tions that were billed as the final step in the trou­bled country’s return to demo­c­ra­tic rule fol­low­ing a bloody Feb­ru­ary 2004 revolt that top­pled for­mer Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Some 29,000 can­di­dates were vying for 1,420 local and munic­i­pal posts in Sunday’s vote, which was marked by low voter turnout and iso­lated reports of violence.

The elec­tions took place more than a year late because of street vio­lence and logis­ti­cal delays. Final results were not expected for sev­eral days.

On Sun­day, assailants burned two polling sta­tions, and shot and wounded a man in the north­ern town of Limon­ade, local media reported. Police later shot and wounded a Fusion party offi­cial after they found him with two Molo­tov cocktails.

In the Port-au-Prince slum of Mar­tis­sant, auto­matic gun­fire rang out after polls opened, but there were no imme­di­ate reports of injuries. Rival gangs have been fight­ing for weeks and had threat­ened to dis­rupt the polling, res­i­dents said.

United Nations peace­keep­ers used tear gas to dis­perse a small crowd that shouted anti-U.N. slo­gans at a polling sta­tion in Cite Soleil, a volatile slum on the edge of Port-au-Prince.

Voter turnout appeared low in most parts of the cap­i­tal of Port-au-Prince, with many polling sta­tions vir­tu­ally empty. Offi­cials had pre­dicted turnout at 40 to 50 per­cent, well below the mas­sive par­tic­i­pa­tion in February’s pres­i­den­tial vote won by Rene Preval.

Vis­it­ing a polling cen­ter in the cap­i­tal, Preval’s prime min­is­ter, Jacques Edouard Alexis, praised the orga­ni­za­tion of the elec­tions but said he had hoped for a higher turnout.

“Cit­i­zens must be informed of the impor­tance of local com­mu­ni­ties,” Alexis told local Radio Metropole.