MORE than 11 million Iraqis went dutifully to the polls yesterday to vote “yes” in a referendum on whether Saddam Hussein should remain as the country’s President.

Saddam won about 99.96 per cent of the vote at the last referendum seven years ago. The only uncertainty yesterday was whether he would achieve 100 per cent this time, matching the Workers’ Party of North Korea in their elections in October 1962.

Celebratory gunfire erupted over Baghdad last night, with anti-aircraft batteries pouring streams of tracer fire into the skies, when Iraqi TV reported that the first five districts in the city to complete their counts were already claiming 100 per cent support for Saddam.

Final nationwide results are due to be announced today, but the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said: “Obviously, it’s not a very serious day, not a very serious vote, and nobody places any credibility on it.”

Little had been left to chance. Many people who picked up their telephones early yesterday found that the dialling tone had been replaced by the campaign slogan of “Na’am, na’am Saddam (Yes, yes, Saddam)”. To achieve maximum publicity for this exercise in democratic government, albeit with compulsory voting, the ruling Baath Party invited a horde of foreign journalists to Iraq, offering them free accommodation in Baghdad’s best hotels. Yesterday they were taken on tours of polling stations, accompanied by Ministry of Information minders.

In Baghdad’s al-Mansour suburb, thousands of teenage soldiers chanted anti-American slogans for the television cameras before entering polling booths lined with excerpts from Saddam’s speeches.

After ticking the “yes” box, each man ran to the ballot box, where he deposited his papers under the watchful eyes of his officers. “They will all vote ‘yes’, not a single one of my men would ever vote ‘no’,” Lieutenant-General Fahran Mahdi, their commanding officer, said.

At the village of al-Jasser, southwest of Baghdad, a small group of men waited for the camera crews to arrive before pricking their thumbs and smearing the “yes” box with their blood, chanting: “With our blood and souls we defend Saddam Hussein.”

Salman Dawood, the senior election official, said that all of the 7,598 people of al-Jasser aged 18 or above had voted “yes” in 1995. Asked how the village would vote this time, he replied: “How can I possibly know? We haven’t started counting yet.”

There were similar scenes at Saddam City, a largely Shia Muslim slum on the outskirts of the capital, where the polling station was decorated with murals pronouncing, in English: “Yes, Yes for Our Leader Saddam Hussein and Death for USA and the Zionism.”

Small children from the Ashbal, the state-organised scouts movement, waited patiently at the entrance, the boys immaculately turned out in camouflage fatigues and the girls in red frocks and lace blouses. At the first sight of a Western journalist, the children began singing anti-American nursery rhymes.

Inside, long queues of men and women picked up their ballot papers, quickly ticked the “yes” box, then cast their vote with the papers unfolded so that party officials were left in no doubt about their loyalty.

Yesterday, there was no sign of Saddam, who rarely appears in public, but within minutes of voting starting his supporters had begun to roam the streets in cars covered with his portraits, beeping their horns in triumph. A few people slaughtered sheep outside polling stations in a traditional Arab act of celebration.

While many of the people of Baghdad entered the polling stations with an air of weary resignation, others were clearly delighted to have their chance to endorse Saddam. Abdul Majid Janabi, 67, who had queued since dawn at one polling station in Baghdad, said: “By voting, I have fired my gun at the head of Bush and his gang.” Izzat Ibrahim, the vice-chairman of Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council, maintained that the result of the referendum would send a strong message to President Bush in Washington. “How will America fight this great people?” he asked.

But what ordinary Iraqis really think is difficult to discern in a country where people have lost their lives for voicing dissent, and where every visiting journalist is assigned a minder from the Ministry of Information. An Iraqi who talks to a journalist out of earshot of a minder is taking a serious risk.

But a handful will share the referendum jokes usually whispered only in the safety of family homes. One is about the long-suffering Baghdad resident who finally plucks up the courage to vote “no”.

He then goes home to his wife and confides what he has done. “Oh Ali,” she wails, “what a calamity. You could lose your job, we could lose our house, you could even lose your life!” Panic-stricken, Ali dashes straight back to the polling station to tell the election officials that he has made a mistake and he wants to change his vote.

“Don’t worry,” an official says. “We know you made a mistake, so we have already changed it for you.”

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