Judges are working on a report evaluating last week's presidential elections. It will be a mix of good and bad, reports Mona El-Nahhas At the downtown headquarters of the Cairo Judges Club on Tuesday, members of the club's board began drafting a detailed report about last week's presidential elections. Based on the testimonies of judges who took part in supervising the vote, the report -- scheduled to appear next week -- will deal with both the positive and negative aspects of 7 September. Cairo Judges Club Secretary-General Hesham Geneina told Al-Ahram Weekly that he hopes the "state will take the [judges'] observations into consideration during the upcoming parliamentary elections." This was crucial, Geneina said, because those elections "would probably be much more decisive" than the presidential poll was. One of the most noteworthy observations made by the judges was the difficulty of monitoring the three or four ballot boxes that were located at each polling station -- a task they described as exhausting. "Having your eyes fixed on three or four boxes at the same time," Geneina said, "was not an easy job." Matters would be made much easier if the elections were spread out over several days, Geneina said. "Judges would then only be responsible for monitoring one ballot box." Complicating matters was the fact that the Presidential Elections Commission (PEC) sidelined around 1500 pro- reform judges from the supervision process. Because their replacements were employees of either the Administrative Prosecution or the State Cases Authority, a bevy of irregularities took place, the Judges Club will report. At some poll stations, they say, the supervisors actually instructed voters to vote for President Hosni Mubarak -- the ruling National Democratic Party candidate -- and his "crescent" election symbol. Another common violation involved not using the curtained off area where voters could make their choice in private. The most flagrant violation, Geneina said, involved the PEC ordering the heads of poll stations to allow voters whose names were not registered on electoral lists to cast their votes without obtaining a pink voter registration card -- a constitutional prerequisite for voting. "It looks like the PEC was asked to boost the turnout, which was very low in the early hours of the day", Geneina said. The PEC will also be blamed for continually contradicting itself in the lead up to the vote. One example cited by Geneina was the commission's last- second decision to allow NGO representatives into the poll stations, after stonewalling on the issue for weeks. By the time the PEC acquiesced on this point, he said, "it was too late for the NGOs to really monitor the elections, since they had already missed out on a lot." When it came to the phosphoric ink meant to guarantee that voters would not cast their ballots more than once, the commission again seemed inconsistent. At some stations, there was no ink. At others, the available ink was shoddy. In the latter case, the judges will say, the ink rubbed off in less than an hour, thus negating its effectiveness as a fraud prevention tool. Overall, it appears the judges will indicate that the elections featured fewer violations than previous polls. One bright spot that will appear in the report relates to the non-interference of the security apparatus. The judges also see the nation's first multi-candidate elections as a testing ground for the upcoming parliamentary poll. "We should start getting ready for the coming battle," Geneina said, by making sure that any observations being made this time are dealt with properly in time for the next vote. These include voters' lists being sorted much more thoroughly, and candidates getting copies of those lists prior to election day so they have enough time to examine them. Effective phosphoric ink should be available at all poll stations, having been tested by judges 24 hours before the big day. A final stipulation for a fair vote involves the heads of polling stations being allowed to inform candidates' representatives of the sorting results. According to Geneina, the judges will continue to fight for these points until all their demands are met. In the lead up to the 7 September poll, the judges and the PEC also battled it out; although not completely satisfied with the commission's decisions on these and other matters, the judges chose -- during their general assembly earlier this month -- to monitor the elections anyway, mainly to expose any violations they came across. The skirmishes are part of a larger demand that judges be given complete judicial supervision over elections. Last May, following the referendum on amending Article 76 of the constitution, the Cairo Judges Club issued a report entitled "Egypt's Conscience" which accused the state and the police of rigging both the referendum results and turnout figures.
