Rights groups say police interference in the balloting process and intimidation of judges and local monitors have further eroded the popularity of the ruling party. Gihan Shahine reports Many would perhaps agree with Saadeddin Ibrahim, director of the Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Human Rights and coordinator of the Independent Committee for Elections Monitoring (ICEM), that this year's polls reveals the "stunning failure" of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). "The ruling party has failed in mobilising the middle class which resulted in a low turnout of 20 per cent in the best of cases and 10 per cent in the worst," Ibrahim said. Ibrahim said the NDP's "systematic" use of violence against opposition supporters helped the Brotherhood "get two-thirds of what they really deserve since one-third of voters were disgruntled people casting a protest vote -- people who want to say 'no' to the regime and are willing to choose anyone else." Other opposition forces seemed not as tempting as the Brotherhood who, according to Ibrahim, proved to be "the most organised, visible and likely to win. Voters would prefer to cast their ballot for a potential winner, not a candidate whose chances are not as certain." "This is not really an election in which competing political programmes were being debated but rather a choice between a regime perceived as despotic and corrupt on the one hand and any other decent or half-decent alternative on the other," Ibrahim said . The Brotherhood have so far tripled their seats in parliament where they now constitute the largest opposition force, all despite a government clampdown on their active members and supporters. The strong showing of the Brotherhood has made many wonder whether the elections were anything near fair despite reports of fraud and violence. "If there is any fairness in the polls, it would be the result of the presence of the judiciary and local supervision -- definitely not because the government had any intention of a fair poll," Ibrahim insisted. Rights groups said this week's run-off elections were again as fraudulent as the first two. The wave of thuggery that swept the second round of polls last week soon gave way to a heavy police presence -- and blatant interference -- into the balloting process on Saturday's run-off vote which started with the mass arrests of hundreds of Brotherhood supporters. Observers said police abandoned all neutrality shown in the first two rounds, attacking and intimidating voters and barring them from reaching ballot boxes in areas where support for the Brotherhood ran high. An earlier report by the National Campaign for the Monitoring of Elections (NCME) said police restricted voting in many areas where no more than two or three voters were allowed into polling stations every 15 minutes when hundreds others queued outside. The NCME report also said that riot police reportedly barred women wearing the niqab (a full veil) -- and any other voter who appeared to have sympathy with the Brotherhood -- from reaching ballot booths, while only giving access to NDP supporters. Ghada El-Shahbandar, of the independent monitoring group Shayfeen.com, said she had spent "two hours in front of two polling stations in Alexandria and no voter showed up". "The turnout cannot be more than five per cent," she said. "Things are going from bad to worse: security policy turned from being negatively neutral toward acts of thuggery and fraud, to being negatively positive, intimidating voters and preventing them from casting their ballots -- just as was the case in the 2000 polls," El-Shahbandar said. The negative attitude on the part of police, Ibrahim added, "was only a reflection of state policy which preferred to do away with window dressing, sacrificing all attempts to appear serious in democratisation rather than lose power to the opposition, a policy which, again, proved to be a stunning failure." Security attacks on voters, according to El-Shahbandar, only improved the chances of the Brotherhood whose supporters proved to be "the most organised, most patient and most resilient to police intimidation". "Other supporters of opposition candidates were intimidated and discouraged to vote except those of the Islamists. They were ready to wait forever until they cast their ballots," El-Shahbandar said. That said, Brotherhood supporters were reportedly the main target of systematic attacks by NDP thugs who used knives and clubs to intimidate voters and prevent them from casting their ballots in various parts of the country. Observers reported the case of a gang of more than 20 wielding machetes, sticks and guns, having attacked Brotherhood organisers outside polling stations in the Nile Delta village of Hayatim and in nearby Bolqina where voters said NDP thugs fired guns in the air and beat voters, including women. Monitors were similarly subjected to systematic attacks by both thugs and riot police. The bulk of observers were reportedly denied access to polling stations during the balloting process and ballot counts. An early ICEM report said two observes were severely beaten as they approached a polling station in Ismailia; the authorities refused to allow them to press charges against the attackers. In Qena, another ICEM observer was reportedly beaten by NDP thugs while in Al-Gharbiya yet another two ICEM observers were arrested even though they were in possession of official ID cards from the Ministry of Justice accrediting them as observers. "There is now an organised campaign of intimidation against ICEM observers orchestrated by NDP thugs," the ICEM report said. Police also arrested an observer from the NCME and confiscated his camera in Suez while he was taking photos of voters being blocked from entering polling stations. The coordinator of the NCME, Mohamed Zarie and NCME member Negad El-Borai, said they were harassed and intimidated by police while observing the balloting process on Saturday. El-Shahbandar similarly told Al-Ahram Weekly that police cooperated with a thug who snatched her ID card and blocked her from entering a polling station instead of trying to catch him. Tareq Khater, of the Human Rights Organisation for Legal Assistance and head of the NCME monitoring committee, said his NGO decided to boycott monitoring the elections when they found it was "marred with a long list of violations that would render the vote totally illegitimate". "We did not want to act as a guise for major fraud," Khater said. "National newspapers will dwell on the few positive notes we mentioned in our reports, such as the use of phosphoric ink and transparent boxes, to claim the vote was free and fair and skip the long list of irregularities we have repeatedly mentioned." Khater said the authorities and the government-affiliated National Council for Human Rights had "lent a deaf ear to our complaints of major fraud. We found our reports were almost useless". The same irregularities that rights groups said almost invalidated the results of the first round of elections seemed to increase in the second round, including vote buying, busing voters to polling stations in order to cast ballots for NDP candidates, and a recurrence of collective registration of voters in constituencies where they do not belong, again to garner more voters for NDP candidates. Voters' lists remained a major violation as at least 30 per cent of the names on the lists either belonged to those deceased, anonymous people without family names or recognised addresses, or were simply repeated, civil groups said. Khater was particularly critical of the Parliamentary Electoral Commission (PEC) which insisted on ignoring court rulings which invalidated results in at least 10 polling stations where voters' lists were rigged and candidates changed their designation from professional to workers, probably to increase their chances of winning. Monitors said candidates did not change their designations in violation of court orders and that the same voters the court had ordered repealed from voters' lists were allowed to cast their ballot in the second round. Rights groups also said the judicial supervision of the vote was far from complete, as promised by the government, not exceeding 15 per cent of the polling centres. Most polling stations, monitors said, were under the supervision of government employees with some legal training but who are not judges. Observers reported some incidents when lawyers interfered in the balloting process, ticking balloting tickets in favour of NDP candidates. "Judges did not participate in preparing voters' lists, defining polling stations, printing and distributing voters' cards or giving out candidate electoral signs," Khater told the Weekly. Judges in some of the areas cordoned by police were reportedly considering calling off the vote and had reported being insulted by police in the Saturday vote. "The regime lost the respect of a very important category of Egyptian society -- the judiciary -- which enjoys century-old respect and prestige by the Egyptian public," Ibrahim said. "The judiciary has declared loud and clear the failure of the regime to protect them while doing their job. The net result is further erosion of the credibility of the regime."
