By Daria Sito-Sucic and Maja Zuvela
SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnians voted for national, regional and local representatives on Sunday in elections dominated by still-unresolved issues of identity and statehood after almost 20 years of peace.
By the close of polls at 7 p.m. (6 p.m. BST), just over half of Bosnia's 3.3 million eligible voters had cast ballots for six layers of government in a system of ethnic power-sharing created to end Bosnia's 1992-95 war but which has stymied development ever since.
Election authorities said results of the vote for Bosnia's three-person state presidency would come around midnight; full results of the parliamentary elections may only come on Monday.
With no clear frontrunners or new faces, the vote looks like being split between many players, raising the prospect of long delays in forming governments at the various levels.
That will only worsen Bosnia's economic outlook, already hit by devastating floods in May that inflicted damage totalling about 2 billion euros (1.5 billion pounds).
Some analysts fear that without radical change to Bosnia's unwieldy system of government, there may be a repeat of unprecedented civil unrest in February when protests over factory closures and unemployment turned violent.
"These are the most uncertain elections ever," said pollster and political analyst Srdjan Puhalo. "I expect that poverty and social problems will increasingly put pressure on politicians to change the way they work, as opposed to coming from their own desire for change," he told state television.
An estimated 100,000 people died in Bosnia's 1992-95 war during the collapse of the socialist Yugoslav federation.
Under its U.S.-brokered postwar settlement, Bosnia is split into two autonomous regions joined by a weak central government, power split along ethnic lines in a highly decentralised and costly system that frequently paralyses decision-making.
Government jobs are reserved for the three main ethnic groups. Limited Western efforts to encourage reform have run into the sand.
"I didn't vote for anyone; they're all the same. I just came to cast an empty ballot so they can't misuse it," said Sarajevo pensioner Saima Alajbegovic.
Stark differences between rival ethnic groups over Bosnia's future were again on prominent display. Bosnia's Orthodox Christian Serb leaders want to secede, the Catholic Croats want a separate entity within Bosnia and the Muslim Bosniaks still cling to the vision of a strong unified state.
The biggest election upset may come in the Serb Republic, where a coalition of opposition parties hopes to end the eight- year dominance of Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who campaigned on calls for secession of the region from Bosnia.
Bakir Izetbegovic, bidding for a new term as the Bosniak member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency - Serbs and Croats also each have a representative - vowed for the end of divisions.
"It's high time to end the standstill and I think that politicians have matured enough to come out of this vicious cycle," he said on Sunday.
(Additional reporting by Gordana Katana; Editing by Matt Robinson and David Evans)