The first voter here was Muhammad Akbar, 22, who dipped his finger in the indelible purple ink, collected his ballot and had just stepped into the cardboard box that serves as a voting booth when gunfire broke out.

“They’re right on time,” said Lt. Col. Kyle Ellison, commander of the Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment.

The Taliban had vowed to disrupt Afghanistan’s parliamentary election and sought to make good on that promise throughout the country on Saturday, The New York Times reports. At least 10 people were killed, scores of polling stations were attacked and hundreds of them apparently never opened.

Even where there was no shooting, turnout appeared to be unusually light. Many polling centers were largely empty for most of the day, in sharp contrast with presidential elections a year ago, where voters waited in long lines to vote. And where there was voting, there were numerous reports of fraud, from vote-buying to ballot-stuffing.

Nonetheless, Afghan officials insisted that in most places the election, a crucial measure of the government’s ability to function on its own before American troops begin to withdraw next year, went ahead without major incident.

“Though there were numerous attacks, none were severe enough to disrupt voting on a wide scale,” the independent Afghan monitoring organization, the Free and Fair Elections Foundation, said in a statement.

Read the entire story at nytimes.com