Mexico's ruling National Action Party (PAN) on Sunday started the final day of internal primary voting to elect who will represent the party in the country's 2012 presidential elections.

For the first time in the Mexican history, a woman candidate is seen set to win the nomination to contest for one of the three main parties in Mexico's July 1 presidential elections.

For weeks, polls have given solid backing to the PAN's Josefina Vazquez Mota, a former Education Minister.

Vazquez got 64.3 percent of votes in a poll published by the local Unonoticias on Sunday, with former Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero and former Interior Minister Santiago Creel running a distant second and third with 14.3 and 12.9 percent of the vote, respectively.

"So far everything has been going well and there has only been two minor problems," Gustavo Madero, president of the conservative PAN party, told reporters in the capital as voting was reported well underway from all the country's 31 states and capital district.

Voting started at 10:00 a.m. local time (16:00 GMT) at 1,689 voting centers across the country in which 1.8 million party members are expected to participate. The first preliminary results of the final vote is scheduled to be announced shortly after 20:00 p.m. (02:00 GMT Monday) while the final results are scheduled to be ready two hours later.

In national polls for the 2012 Mexican presidential elections, Vazquez is running a distant second with 28 percent of the vote after Enrique Pena Nieto, who as candidate for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) currently holds 50 percent of public support.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, runs third with 22 percent for the Party for the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Obrador lost in the 2006 elections to Mexico's President Felipe Calderon and bitterly refused to accept his defeat for months on allegations of fraud, which after months of investigations were proven unfounded.