By GINGER THOMPSON
 
EXICO CITY (May 16) - Mired in their worst economic crisis in recent history, voters in the Dominican Republic came out in large numbers on Sunday to cast ballots for a new president. Numerous polls indicated they would bring back former President Leonel Fernández.

The voting was described by independent observers and diplomats as "massive" and "orderly." However, in a country where elections are routinely tainted with fraud and violence, tensions were high among the country's main political camps, which exchanged accusations of unfair campaign practices in the days leading up to the election. On Sunday morning, soldiers were dispatched to a polling place in Barahona, a southwestern town, after gunfire left three people dead and two others wounded.

Santiago Murray, chief of the Organization of American States elections mission, said that the shooting had cast a pall over the contests, but that most of the voting was fair and open. He estimated that about 70 percent of the country's five million registered voters cast ballots.

A Gallup poll, published by the free newspaper Diario Libre, gave a 13-point advantage to Mr. Fernández, a 50-year-old lawyer who governed the country from 1996 to 2000. He was considered a political protégé of Joaquín Balaguer, the revered and reviled leader who dominated politics in Dominican Republic for four decades before he died in 2002.

Although his own government was clouded by charges of corruption, political observers said Mr. Fernández's popularity reflected people's wide discontent with the incumbent candidate, Hipólito Mejía, a 63-year-old agronomist with an earthy political style whose government many Dominicans blame for pushing one of the region's fastest growing economies close to ruin.

In two years, $2.2 billion has been taken from public coffers to cover the costs of the collapse of one of the country's largest banks, Banco Intercontinental. Inflation has soared to about 43 percent, and the value of the nation's currency has declined by more than half.

The economic crisis has sent waves of Dominican migrants across the Caribbean to Puerto Rico. The United States Coast Guard has reported intercepting more than 3,200 Dominicans at sea so far this year, up from 1,469 in all of 2003. About two dozen died during the passage.

"Leonel Fernández will win, because Hipólito has done nothing for this country," said Juan Zapata, a security guard at a polling place in a working-class neighborhood in Santo Domingo, the capital.

For the first time, 52,000 registered Dominican voters living primarily in the United States and Spain, were allowed to cast ballots in today's elections. The Central Bank reported that Dominicans living abroad sent an estimated $2.6 billion to their homeland last year.