Election results are expected sometime this week, although officials have not said precisely when.  There were long lines of people waiting to vote on Sunday throughout the capital, and in poorer districts feelings ran high as the hours passed and flaws in the voting process became evident.  Soldiers fired tear gas to disperse an impatient crowd outside the crumbling school in the Kinguele district where Ms. Makaya waited to vote. At a polling place in the Nkembo neighborhood overlooking the sea, an angry crowd overturned the large plastic box into which ballots had been placed. They said that election officials had deliberately not signed the ballots.  “These votes are worthless,” Martin Nbangema shouted.  Charles Marcel said, “They are doing everything they can to fix the vote.” Hundreds of people in the schoolyard outside the polling place agreed.  Some people severely beat a young man who they said was from Ghana and had fraudulently tried to vote. The man was rescued by police officers.  “This can’t continue, this fraud — 40 years, that’s enough,” Alain Nzeondo said. “Gabon is a republic, not a kingdom.”  David Zeng Ollmo said that “Gabon will be in cinders” if Mr. Bongo wins the election.  Heavily armed troops and police officers patrolled at some polling places, evidence to some citizens of the authorities’ nervousness over the election.  Some people objected to the soldiers’ presence. “It’s not right,” said Dieudonné Moubamba. “The army’s place isn’t in the voting booth. They should stay in their barrack.”  Some people said that the remarkable size of the voting list — with more than 800,000 voters in a country with a population of no more than 1.3 million, much of it quite young — was evidence that the outcome had been predetermined. Omar Bongo, who died in early June, regularly ran up election margins of as much as 70 percent, which was evidence to some people of ballot manipulation.  As darkness fell Sunday, there were still lines, with many people having spent all day waiting to vote. Candles dimly illuminated election officials passing out ballots in a school in the Sotega district. There was no electricity, and rain fell on those who had not yet cast their ballots.  “People are voting in darkness,” Jean Ondo Toung said. “This isn’t serious. The Bongo system is rotten.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Pockets of Trouble Amid Presidential Vote in Gabon. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The son of the late El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba, one of Africa’s last “Big Men,” was considered likely to extend his family’s control of the small central African nation.