Nationwide, security for Saturday's vote was a "resounding success," with all of 13 recorded attacks aimed at election targets failing, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S. military, said in Baghdad. Boylan said Iraqi forces in the Shiite city of Hilla stopped two women — one from Jordan, the other from Saudi Arabia — wearing explosive vests.

One of at least two mortar rounds heard Saturday in Baghdad landed inside the Green Zone, where some lawmakers and others voted behind the concrete barriers and concertina wire.

In insurgent strongholds, such as Baghdad's southern neighborhood of Doura, where gunmen sometimes take to the streets by the score, the absence of major attacks suggested Iraqi militant groups had kept their promise of election-day calm. "There was a large turnout," said lawyer Abdul Amir Yousuf, 68, ringed by Iraqi police.

Coincidentally or not, Saturday's vote fell on the date of Saddam's last show election, in 2002, when he declared his government had been approved by 100 percent of Iraqi voters.

January's elections for national and provincial parliaments were the country's first free votes in almost a half-century. But the resulting seating of a Shiite-led government April 28 was the cue for what have been unceasing daily bombings and other political violence, killing thousands.

Saturday, most of the elation seen in January's vote was gone. Men, leading wives, sisters and daughters to protect them, made straight lines through milling children to the polls and then retreated back inside their homes.

Many voters objected strongly to the last-minute deal-making that kept many Iraqis from seeing the draft constitution in its final form.

"I may be in the minority, but first of all I am not voting to support something I have not seen, and they never showed us the constitution," said Majeed Khadhan, 35, a taxi driver in Najaf. "Second, the Americans say this is about democracy, but we do not live in a democracy when we are occupied. . . . This constitution will not help that. It was made to please the politicians, not to please the people."

Some, however, kept their January excitement.

"I cannot read, but my sons and daughters read parts of the constitution to me and told me it would provide security and stability in the future," said 85-year-old Mardhiya Omar Ibrahim, carried to a poll in Mosul on her son's back. "So I went out to vote for it because I want the future to be safe and peaceful for my sons and grandchildren."