With more than 50,000 polling stations spread across 28 governorates, what will local election monitors be doing on election day, asks Mohamed Abdel-Baky On his way back to the Gharbiya governorate from Cairo after taking part in training sessions on election monitoring organised by the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR), Ahmed Adel called his friends, urging them to volunteer with the small NGO Adel runs and help monitor the upcoming parliamentary elections. So far, only 10 have agreed, a far cry from the 2005 elections, when people were far more enthusiastic about volunteering as elections monitors. Now, however, "circumstances are very different," Adel says, and it is far more difficult to persuade people to get involved. Egyptian civil society organisations are helping to monitor this year's parliamentary elections in four main groups covering most of the 28 governorates. The Egyptian Alliance for Election Monitoring is one of the most important of the organisations monitoring the elections, bringing together some 120 NGOs working in 26 governorates and having some 1,000 observers. The alliance has announced that it has put together an integrated strategy to monitor the elections, combining the efforts of observers with testimonies from ordinary people and media coverage. "We know that 1,000 observers is still very few, but we have limited resources, and there has been a lack of interest among people at large in participating in the election monitoring," said Ahmed Samih, director of the Al-Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti- Violence Studies, one of the NGOs in the coalition, in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly. Samih added that the alliance would be inviting people to contribute any information they might have about possible violations via a hotline. All complaints received would be checked by alliance observers, Samih said, adding that because the alliance only had some 1,000 official observers, the input of ordinary people was all the more essential if all the country's polling stations were to be monitored on election day. With more than 50,000 polling stations, there is a need for more than 15,000 observers if stations in every city and village are to be covered. This is especially the case given that the elections will be held in one day, and not in stages as was the case for the 2005 elections. Samih said that the alliance would be aiming to optimise its efforts by using new technology that makes it easy for all to be involved and to report any possible abuses. This technology depends on a special Internet server that contains details of all the country's parliamentary constituencies, together with the contact details of alliance observers. The server can process SMS messages, pictures and videos, and members of the public will be able to log on to the elections as they take place via the Internet. A special elections television channel on the alliance website will air live interviews, commentary and news briefings throughout the day. Other groups, such as the Independent Coalition for Election Monitoring, are focussing on building the capacity of observers in governorates that have previously had few or no election monitors. The Independent Coalition consists of three organisations, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Egyptian Association For Community Participation and Development, and the Nazra Association for Feminist Studies. Sources in the coalition said that it had the capacity to monitor the most important 40 constituencies only, some of which may be expected to witness violations. The Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Development Studies has created its own network of more than 30 local NGOs, calling this the Popular Campaign for Monitoring the Elections. The campaign will cover a small number of governorates. However, the largest observer group is the Egyptian Association for Supporting Democratic Development (EASDD). Director of the EASDD Mahmoud Ali told the Weekly in an interview that the group had some 5,000 observers, enough to cover most constituencies. The EASDD had developed a strategy to intensify monitoring at certain hot constituencies, in order to record everything that takes place, from the early hours of the elections day to the last stages when the results are announced. The group has developed software linked to the Google Maps website, which helps visitors to the EASDD's website on election day get information about what is happening in their constituency. Google Maps will show where the EASDD's observers are, together with their reports and contact details. Given the number of different groups involved in monitoring the elections, creating one umbrella organisation to coordinate the work of all the different groups might seem an impossible task, and in fact it has not taken place since 1995, according to a study by the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. Eight coalitions of monitoring groups monitored the 2005 parliamentary elections, with some 128 NGOs being members of the coalitions. An absence of coordination on this occasion led to "chaos", the Al-Ahram study said, "since many NGOs covered the same constituencies, while others had no observers at all." In 1995, by contrast, two main coalitions of monitoring groups were responsible for monitoring that year's elections, one led by the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights and the other by the Ibn Khaldoun Centre. Though this was an improvement on the 2005 picture, it was still less than ideal as the two coalitions could not work together, given the pressure put on the Ibn Khaldoun Centre. The Al-Ahram study, authored by Ayman Abdel-Wahab of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said that all the monitoring groups had suffered from poor sources of information. "The only chance Egyptian civil society has to play a role in the upcoming elections is if it brings together these coalitions in one hub in order to coordinate the fieldwork," Abdel-Wahab wrote. He noted that having one central hub could help delegate tasks among the coalitions, allowing them to cover most constituencies and rationalise the use of their limited funds. According to an activist working with the Alliance for Election Monitoring, behind the division between the coalitions lies the fact that few organisations have sufficient funds, creating a gap between NGOs working in the field of elections monitoring in terms of the kind and number of activities that each group can do. NGOs of this sort generally receive no state funding, and they often work with extremely limited resources. The alliance source added that member groups of the alliance and other NGOs had applied for grants, but many donors had rejected the requests, citing budgetary constraints. During the 2005 parliamentary elections, many Egyptian NGOs received funds from foreign donors, mostly from the US and EU, to monitor the polls. However, in many cases much of the money was spent on capacity-building courses and workshops for lawyers, activists and journalists. At the end of September, the USAID country director in Egypt told journalists that USAID had no plans to fund local NGOs to monitor the elections. Activists from the different monitoring groups are expected to meet soon to define common ground for cooperation, including the drawing up of a common final report after the elections. Also since 2005, local NGOs working in elections monitoring have had to work with the High Election Committee (HEC), mandated by law to issue guidelines organising the work of NGOs monitoring the elections on polling day. In order to enter polling stations, NGO observers must first obtain HEC approval by applying to the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR). However, according to Bahieddin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights (CIHR), "the NCHR does not have the capability to mediate between local NGOs and the HEC, and the NCHR does not have the legal jurisdiction to issue approvals for observers." Hassan said that the Independent Coalition for Election Monitoring had decided that it would not apply for approval via the NCHR, but would apply directly to the HEC. The same stance has been taken by the Egyptian Alliance. The HEC's record in issuing approvals to observers through the NCHR has created mistrust between the HEC and local NGOs. In the elections to the Shura Council, the upper house of Egypt's parliament, held in June, the NCHR allowed 1,800 observers to monitor the elections, but turned down a further 3,000 requests for unknown reasons. The delegation of the approvals procedure to the NCHR goes back to 2005, when hundreds of NGOs applied for permission to monitor the parliamentary elections and the HEC rejected their requests. Some NGOs then went to court and got a ruling from the Administrative Court to the effect that they were allowed to monitor polling stations, since this was "a right granted by the constitution". In an interview with the Weekly, Ambassador Mahmoud Karem, secretary- general of the NCHR, said that the council was doing everything in its power to facilitate the observers' work.
