From staff and wire reports

                  SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- Voters in the Dominican Republic
                  go to the polls on Tuesday to choose a new president.

                  Their choice is between a populist who offers to spread the wealth of the
                  country's recent economic boom, a technocrat who is the hand-picked
                  successor of the ruling president, and a 93-year-old who a majority of the
                  population believe has supernatural powers.

                  Despite an economy described by the World Bank as the most successful in
                  Latin America, Danilo Medina, the man endorsed by sitting President Leonel
                  Fernandez, is shown by some polls to be running neck and neck for second
                  place with about 25 percent of the vote. Fernandez is constitutionally barred
                  from holding consecutive terms.

                  If no candidate takes more than 50 percent of the vote in the election, a runoff
                  between the two leading vote-getters will be held on June 30.

                  Polls show Hipolito Mejia of the center-left Dominican Revolutionary Party
                  (PRD) to be leading with about 45 percent of the vote.

                  The 59-year-old Mejia is targeting the poor and rural workers with a message
                  that under his leadership they would no longer be excluded from the wealth being
                  generated in the country.

                  Despite visible signs of economic growth -- a building boom, new highways and
                  increased trade -- 20 percent of Dominicans live in poverty, and the median
                  income is $2,000.

                  'I cannot feed my family'

                  "I don't know what progress they're talking about. I cannot feed my family," said
                  Julio Cesar Encarnacion, a Mejia supporter who supports his family of two on a
                  $200 per month income as a postal worker and lives in a Santo Domingo slum.

                  "We can't continue with the current economic model, and we don't deserve to,
                  but we also can't go back to the past, because it's time that the first concern of
                  the government is the well-being of the people," said Mejia, a 59-year-old farm
                  economist.

                  Agriculture remains the dominant industry for most Dominicans, and Mejia
                  claims that agriculture has been neglected in the government's drive to build
                  tourism and foreign trade.

                  Mejia has never held elected office but was the running mate of Jose Francisco
                  Pena Gomez, from whom he took over the party leadership after the charismatic
                  party leader died in 1998.

                  Mejia was farm minister under former President Antonio Guzman and is credited
                  with rebuilding the agriculture sector after it was devastated by Hurricane David
                  in 1979.

                  The president's chosen successor, Medina, the candidate for the Dominican
                  Liberation Party (PLD), promises that continuing Fernandez's free market will
                  eventually benefit the entire population.

                  "There has been and there still is, a lot of social inequality in this country," he
                  said in a recent interview.

                  "But that's not the fault of the government. That existed before. Our government
                  has created half a million jobs," he said.

                  "I am the only one able to continue this wave of progress and modernity," he
                  said.

                  'President in two centuries'

                  But nostalgia for the past, when a patriarchal, authoritarian government
                  dispensed jobs and patronage seems one of the key factors in the growth of
                  support for 93-year-old former president Joaquim Balaguer of the conservative
                  Social Christian Reformist Party (PRSC).

                  "President in two centuries" reads a banner outside the home of the man who
                  first became president as the puppet of Rafael Trujillo, who was assassinated in
                  1961.

                  Balaguer, who has been president seven times over a 22-year period, is ailing and
                  blind. He has made only brief and limited campaign appearances but is still
                  running even with Medina with about 25 percent of the vote, according to polls.

                  A recent opinion poll showed that more than 70 percent of Dominicans believe
                  Balaguer, who has been at the center of the country's political life for almost 50
                  years, to have supernatural powers.

                  In his limited campaign stops, he has gone out to villages, handing out toys and
                  medicine and listening to requests for a baseball field or a school bus.

                  He has pledged to "govern as I have always governed."

                  Balaguer has focused in his campaign on what he terms "real farm reform" and
                  strong measures against illegal immigration from neighboring Haiti, with which
                  the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispanialo.

                  "Every Dominican family will be able to live and die in his own house, the
                  countryside will flower again, and every farmer will be able to live comfortably
                  on his beans," he said in a recent speech.

                  It is widely expected that whoever is eliminated in the first round will throw their
                  support behind the other in a bid to stop the distribution of wealth promised by
                  Mejia.

                  In the 1996 election, Fernandez was elected after Balaguer, who had left office
                  early under pressure after a 1994 victory widely believed to have been
                  fraudulent, abandoned his own party's candidate and threw his support behind
                  Fernandez.

                  The Central Election Board (JCE) has denounced moves in recent days by the
                  government's immigration service to withdraw voting papers from black
                  Dominicans of Haitian origin, who live in the sugar-growing areas and who are
                  traditionally loyal to the PRD.

                  "Today there has been a redoubling of the operation to take away voter cards
                  from people with dark skins," said JCE president Manuel Ramon Morel Cerda on
                  Sunday.

                  Voting in a Dominican election is divided by sex, with women voting in the
                  morning and men in the afternoon.

                  One hundred and sixty-three international observers, including members of the
                  U.S.-based Carter Center and the Organization of American States and the
                  National Democratic Institute, an arm of the U.S. political party, will monitor the
                  election.

                  Some 4.3 million people are eligible to vote, the first results are expected soon
                  after the polls close at 6 p.m., with full results likely within 24 hours.

                   Correspondent Harris Whitbeck, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to
                                           this report.