Several candidates contesting elections for Egypt's Engineers Syndicate are demanding that the vote be delayed after a technical error prevented voters from casting ballots online. Candidate Tarek El-Nabrawi said polling should be postponed by at least one week as a result of the glitch. But Mostafa El-Gazawi, head of the syndicate's Supreme Elections Committee, said postponing the vote was “not an option.” He stressed that the technical error had been unintentional, noting that efforts to iron it out were ongoing. Heads of the syndicate's electoral committees, meanwhile, are allowing voters to cast their ballots offline until the system for online registration is fixed. Irrigation Minister Hisham Kandil blasted the apparent lack of organisation, noting that preparations for the elections had cost some LE6 million. “There should certainly be more organisation,” he said, attributing the chaos to the fact that polls were being conducted without judicial oversight for the first time in years. Prior to Egypt's January revolution, a court verdict had eliminated the judicial supervision of elections that had been ordered by the Mubarak regime, under which syndicate elections were suspended for 17 years. In Kafr El-Sheikh and other governorates throughout Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist activists have been competing for seats in various professional syndicates. A number of syndicates are already dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had represented the largest and best organised opposition force during the Mubarak era.
