President Nursultan Nazarbayev's supporters dominated a poll in oil-rich Kazakhstan on Sunday, according to early results, but a leading opposition party complained it was not allowed to check the count. The election for members of the Central Asian state's lower house was seen as a test of Kazakhstan's ability to match rapid economic growth with political plurality by holding its first free poll in a region dominated by authoritarian leaders. The opposition Ak Zhol (Bright Path) party, running third according to early results, said local election officials were preventing its members from verifying the count. It was far behind Nazarbayev's Otan (Fatherland) and just trailing his daughter Dariga's Asar (All Together) party. "In many places we're finding that they won't give us the tallies and won't sign them because, we think, they want to change them," Ak Zhol co-chairman Alikhan Baimenov told Reuters. "They don't want us to conduct a parallel count." Nazarbayev earlier urged Kazakhstan's eight million voters to disregard his opponents' "empty promises of mountains of gold" and vote for stability -- crucial for Western investors in the country's booming oil and gas sector. --MORE 2334 Local Time 2034 GMT
