NEW ORLEANS — Mayor Ray Nagin and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu will compete in a runoff next month after Saturday's mayoral election, a tricky experiment in modern-day democracy that gave voters scattered by Hurricane Katrina a say in this city's future.
With 94 percent of precincts reporting in the nonpartisan primary, Nagin topped all candidates with 38 percent or 30,260 votes but fell short of the majority needed to win a second term and avoid the May 20 runoff.
Landrieu had 28 percent, or 22,073 votes. Nonprofit executive Ron Forman followed with 17 percent, 13,334 votes, and 19 other candidates trailed far behind.
Landrieu cast his showing as a testament to the unity the city needs after Katrina, a storm that he said put all of New Orleans "literally in the same boat."
Nagin did not immediately make a statement.
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Problem-free voting
Elections officials say the voting was steady and unusually problem-free, and while they didn't immediately have complete numbers, the returns appeared low.
Of the city's 297,000 registered voters, tens of thousands are spread out across the United States. More than 20,000 cast ballots early by mail, fax or at satellite voting stations around the state, and thousands more made their way to 76 improvised polling stations. Some traveled by bus or in car caravans from such evacuee havens as Houston, Dallas and Atlanta.
Around the city, black and white voters were seen moving steadily in and out of the "super polling places" that stood for the dozens of wrecked schools and churches where residents would ordinarily have voted.
Race has become a key factor in the election. Less than half the city's pre-Katrina population of 455,000 has returned, and civil rights activists note that most of those scattered outside the city are black.
Before the storm, the city was more than two-thirds black.
Not all evacuees who returned to New Orleans on Saturday were able to cast ballots. Dana Young, an 18-year-old college freshman who traveled by bus from Atlanta, was told at the polls that there was no record of her registration. Young said she had a voter registration card but lost it along with her birth certificate during the hurricane.
"I'm really upset," she said as tears welled up in her eyes.
"I came all the way down here and now I can't do anything about it. They said they couldn't find me in the system, so I can't vote."
