Opposition forces demand a complete overhaul of voter lists, reports Mohamed Abdel-Baky The NDP's sweep of the Shura Council polls is being seen by opposition groups as a wake-up call to revise voters' lists ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections. Calls are growing, from the opposition and also from some members of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), to allow voters to cast their ballots on the basis of national ID cards rather than the voting cards currently issued by the Ministry of Interior. Such a change, the Ministry of Interior insists, requires parliamentary approval. "The election law can be amended to enable IDs to be used instead of voting cards but such an amendment is at the discretion of parliament, not the Ministry of Interior," said General Mohamed Rifaat Qomsan, director of the General Administration of Elections at the ministry, during a seminar at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. A study published by the Egyptian Campaign for Fair Elections cites the current system, with its outdated voter lists, as a major obstacle to free and fair elections. First, says the report, citizens have a limited window to apply for voting cards, since registration is allowed only between 1 November and 31 January. Under the 1956 law on the exercise of political rights Egyptians aged 18 must register themselves between these dates at the nearest police station to their homes. Theoretically, they should then receive a voting card some time in February. The complicated procedure, argues the study, has led to a "collective reluctance among Egyptians to participate in the electoral process". There are also discrepancies in the database used by the Ministry of Interior, which is legally bound to create and revise voter lists every year. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are registered using only their first and second names, which "opens the door to electoral fraud, allowing the same person to cast repeated ballots in different places". There is also concern over the names of the deceased remaining on the lists. Following revisions the Ministry of Interior announced earlier this year there are now 39 million registered voters in Egypt. Though the names of 349,000 voters who died last year have been removed from the list, civil society organisations fear the real number of dead voters is far greater. "The only way to fix this mess is to revise the lists on the basis of the ID database," Muslim Brotherhood MP Hamdi Hassan told Al-Ahram Weekly. After all, he points out, the database is used by every other government institution. Nor, he says, should it be so difficult for the NDP to pass the necessary legislation given that it was able to change 37 articles of the constitution in 2007. Not that Hassan holds out much hope the changes will be made. "This government," he says, "is unwilling to hold a fair and transparent election". In responding to such criticisms, the NDP's line appears to be to support change in principle and disagree in the details. In March Gamal Mubarak, the chairman of the NDP's Policies Committee, said in a speech delivered in Luxor that "the party insists on having fair and free elections" and correcting any mistakes in voter lists. He did not, however, furnish any details on how this might be achieved. Maged El-Sherbini, a member of the Policies Committee and an appointee to the Shura Council, told the Weekly that the NDP supports "all necessary measures to make the election fair, but using ID cards instead of voters' cards will not solve the problem". "Currently there is a project run by the Ministry of Interior to update voter lists and issue new electronic cards that contain all the relevant information about voters," he said. According to El-Sherbini the project could take more than 18 months to implement and is unlikely to be finished before the next presidential election. Legal experts say new legislation is not technically necessary for the ID card database to be used to prepare voter lists since the Higher Election Committee has a comprehensive mandate to create accurate lists. In the recent Shura election NGOs led a campaign encouraging citizens to go to police stations and pick up their voting cards. "A small number of voters did so but most had no idea they were registered in the first place," says Ehab Bahi, programme officer at the Egyptian Association for the Support of Democracy. He added that many people went to cast their vote only to find their names had been omitted. Others found people with the same names had already taken their slot, while yet more could not be issued with the necessary voting card. From his experience in supervising elections judge Ahmed Mekki does not think the government "will give up the old system" which, he says, "allows many people to vote more than once".
