Thousands of people in south China's village of Wukan went to polls Saturday to elect a new village committee, several months after staging massive protests over illegal land sales and other issues.

Lin Zulian, the village's Communist Party of China (CPC) secretary.

The villagers cast their ballots at a voting center set up on a village school campus 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday. The results are due late Saturday night.

Twenty-two candidates delivered public speeches on Wednesday to woo votes.

"I hope the winners will be brave people of integrity who will dare to take responsibility and won't let us down," said villager Chen Xidong.

The village committee includes a chief, two deputy chiefs and four committee members. A 50-percent turnout is required to validate the election results, and winning candidates are required to take at least half of the votes.

Saturday's voting marked the last phase of a three-phase election that has resulted in the selection of an 11-member election committee and 109 village representatives thus far.

The fishing village has 8,107 registered voters out of a population of about 12,000. Voters are required to show identification and obtain written authorization before they can cast their votes.

"This is a very solemn and regulated election," said Zhu Jiangang, head of the social development research center at Guangzhou-based Sun Yat-sen University.

"The procedural details are as good as what I have seen in many elections in the west," Zhu said.

Residents in Wukan confronted the local government over illegal land grabs, financing and the violation of local election regulations in the second half of last year.

Protests simmered for months before coming to an end in late December after a provincial government work team held talks with the villagers. The group acknowledged that the villagers' demands were reasonable and that "some mistakes" were made by local officials.