SPEC announces final presidential poll results, confirms Brotherhood's Morsi will face Mubarak-era PM Shafiq in next month's runoff; AO provides a table of official vote counts for all 12 candidates Egypt's Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission (SPEC) officially announced on Monday that Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohamed Morsi and last Mubarak-era premier Ahmed Shafiq will face each other in a runoff vote slated for 16 and 17 June. Following a final vote count, Morsi was confirmed as the leading candidate in the first round of Egypt's first post-Mubarak presidential elections, having garnered just shy of 25 per cent of the vote in last week's poll. He was closely followed by Shafiq, who secured 23.66 per cent of the vote, according to figures released by the SPEC at a press conference on Monday. Nasserist contender Hamdeen Sabbahi, meanwhile, came in at third place with 20.72 per cent, eliminating him – to the chagrin of liberal and leftist voters – from the race. According to SPEC figures, the five front-running candidates (and their respective votes) wereas follows: 1. Mohamed Morsi( 5,764,952 votes) 2. Ahmed Shafiq(5,505,327 votes) 3. Hamdeen Sabbahi(4,820,273 votes) 4. Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh(4,065,239 votes) 5. Amr Moussa(2,588,850 votes) At Monday's press conference, SPEC Chairman Farouk Sultan, who is also head of Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court, confirmed that four appeals lodged against the final vote count had been thrown out. Sultan neglected to specify which presidential candidates had lodged the appeals. Sultan also noted that three additional appeals had not been considered, since they were submitted after the deadline set by the SPEC for challenging vote results. He went on to say that the number of valid ballots cast in the first round had come to 23,265,516, putting total turnout at 46.42 per cent of eligible voters. The number of invalid ballots, meanwhile, stood at 406,720, according to Sultan. The last timeEgyptians went to the polls to elect a presidentwas in 2005, in the country's first-ever "multi-candidate elections." Mubaraksecured 87 per cent of the vote (6.3 million votes) in that poll, while liberal lawyer and Ghad Party founder Ayman Nour finished a distant second with 7 per cent(540,000 votes). Some 7.1 million Egyptians – out of 32 million registered voters – cast ballots that year. The final vote count for all 13 candidates in last week's first-round presidential poll, according to SPEC figures, is as follows: Mohamed Morsi 5,764,952 24.78% Ahmed Shafiq 5,505,327 23.66% Hamdeen Sabbahi 4,820,273 20.72% Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh 4,065,239 17.47% Amr Moussa 2,588,850 11.13% Mohamed El-Awa 235,374 1.01% Khaled Ali 134,056 0.58% Abul-Ezz El-Hariri 40,090 0.17% Hisham El-Bastawisi 29,189 0.13% Mahmoud Hossam 23,992 0.10% Mohamed Fawzi 23,889 0.10% Hossam Khairallah 22,036 0.09% Abdullah El-Ashaal 12,249 0.05% Total valid votes 23,265,516 100.00% http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/43132.aspx
