Egypt's three-day presidential elections, which opened on Monday under the supervision of around 16,000 judges nationwide along with tight security measures, seem to have met expectations that they would be relatively free and transparent—at least on the technical level. Former military chief Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and his rival, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, were the only two contenders in the presidential race. “Many types of violations occurred over the two-day vote, ranging from campaigning outside polling stations and influencing voters. All these things were mostly committed in favour of the main candidate, of course,” said Magdi Abdel-Hamid, President of the Egyptian Association for Community Participation Enhancement (EACPE), an NGO, which had deployed 1,000 monitors nationwide. However, Abdel-Hamid said that the violations had been “sporadic” and had “not affected the final results or the legitimacy of the balloting process.” However Al-Marsad Al-Arabi for Rights and Freedoms, an NGO that is against the 30 June Revolution, issued a report saying that “serious violations occurred, threatening the legitimacy of the balloting process.” The most prominent of these violations, according to Al-Marsad, was “rigging balloting cards in favour of Al-Sisi in attempts to forge a higher voter turnout, which was low enough to undermine the credibility of the vote.” Irregularities reported before Al-Ahram Weekly went to print included the late opening of dozens of polling stations in Qaloubiya, the security forces reportedly banning some journalists and monitors from entering polling stations, campaigning outside polling stations and influencing voters to cast their ballots for one candidate rather than the other. The Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Democratic Studies, an NGO, singled out influencing voters as “the major violation marring the two-day polls.” Members of the Salafist Al-Nour Party were reportedly seen in Sohag lobbying for Al-Sisi and offering free rides to voters. The Press Syndicate reported that the Presidential Elections Commission (PEC) overseeing the elections had not recognised reporters' permits and had not allowed reporters to cover the elections in Qena. A police officer reportedly assaulted a reporter from the independent Al-Osbou newspaper outside Al-Azhar in Cairo while he was covering the elections. Some members of Sabahi's campaign were reportedly apprehended by the security forces in a polling station in Shubra Al-Kheima, also in Cairo, after they had disputed electoral campaigning outside the polling station in favour of Al-Sisi. Loay Al-Deeb, President of the Global Network for Rights and Development, whose organisation was observing the polls, told Asharq Al-Awsat that the “organisation's observers had recorded some insignificant violations on Monday.” Al-Deeb added that observers had found some people at polling stations in Mansoura provoking some voters to invalidate their voting card and that some election centres opened their doors late, particularly in Upper Egypt and Sinai. However, generally speaking the polls went smoothly under the scrutiny of 80 domestic civil society groups and five foreign organisations, all of whom deployed observers to monitor the polls. “Tight security measures managed to protect the balloting process against militant attacks and the logistics of the polling itself went smoothly,” Abdel-Hamid noted. About 30,000 to 40,000 local and foreign observers reportedly witnessed the elections, according to official statistics. The European Union, the Arab League, the Carter Centre, the US-based Democracy International, and the African Union were among the most prominent international watchdogs licensed by the PEC to observe the elections. On the local level, the government-affiliated National Centre for Human Rights (NCHR) had earlier declared that it had trained 6,500 observers from 38 organisations to witness the vote. Abdel-Aziz Salman, spokesman for the PEC, earlier told the Weekly that although there were just two candidates standing in the elections “the number of local and foreign monitors observing the presidential polls far exceeded the number registered in the 2012 elections when 13 candidates ran for office.” Egypt's interim government was keen to grant licenses to a record number of local and foreign observers, in order to receive international validation of an election that, it said, reflected the will of the people. Such international validation, observers explained, would support the argument that Egypt was heading towards democracy; something that both the US and the EU insist is a primary condition for any future economic and political cooperation. Observers say Egypt's interim authorities were extremely cooperative in smoothing over the paperwork of foreign observers, delivering the message that Egypt was determined to break free from the past when fraud and rigging could be the norm and transparency could be almost non-existent. However, human rights activist Mohamed Zarei, who had been monitoring the polls independently, said that the PEC had not always been as cooperative in issuing licenses for local monitors. “For local observers, the conditions were restrictive, and the fact that monitors were only allowed half an hour inside the polling stations immediately affects the credibility of any foreign or local monitors' reports,” Zarie told the Weekly. The US-based Carter Centre, which observed the Egyptian parliamentary elections in 2011 and the presidential elections in 2012, said in a statement issued prior to the elections that it had concerns about its decision to send only “a small mission to Egypt this year to focus on the broader legal and political context, rather than witnessing the election day procedures themselves.” Its concerns included a “restrictive” political and legal context, the lack of a “genuinely competitive campaign environment” and “the political polarisation” that it said hampered Egypt's conversion to democracy. The centre also came under fire for having issued “a premature assessment” of the vote. Head of the Arab League delegation tasked with monitoring the polls, Haifa Abou Ghazala, said in an interview with the satellite channel Al-Qahira Wal-Nas that the Carter Centre had “lost credibility” when it passed judgment on the polls even before they started. Bahieddin Hassan, Secretary-General of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), an NGO, argued that monitoring the polls did not stop at the technicalities of the balloting process, but also included the political atmosphere in which they took place. “The balloting process might have been 'technically clean', but it lacked the minimum requirements of a political environment for having a free and fair elections in the first place, which is due to the human rights conditions that have deprived Egyptians of an opportunity to express their views and to vote freely,” Hassan said.
