Voters now need only their ID cards to vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections, reports Mohamed Abdel-Baky Calls to change the voting system which would allow voters to cast their ballots by using national ID cards rather than the red voting cards have been answered after the Higher Elections Commission (HEC) announced that citizens born after 1980 would be able to vote using only their national ID card. But the HEC has a condition: voters should be registered first by the Ministry of Interior in the voters' lists. "Citizens should be able to vote using their passport or national ID if they are registered at voters' lists," El-Sayed Abdel-Aziz Omar, the director of the HEC, told Egyptian television. "If they do not have any ID they could vote if they are recognised by candidates' observers at the poll stations," Omar added. Opposition leaders welcomed the move by the HEC and said it represents momentum for opposition candidates. Chairman of the Wafd Party El-Sayed El-Badawi said the step would enhance the vote for an additional 18 million people, which is "a big change that every Egyptian should know about." But the decision by the HEC that the public be allowed to vote by using national ID cards does not mean that voters' lists in this election have been prepared by using the national ID digital data base system. Mohamed Refaat Qomsan, director of the General Administration of Elections at the Ministry of Interior, said in a press briefing that voters' lists in the election have almost 40 million voters prepared by the ministry, but not all the names have a national ID. He did not mention anything about adding 18 million people to the list. Qomsan recognised that the current voters' lists have "hundreds of mistakes in names and other details," adding that correcting these mistakes is the responsibility of the citizen who should submit a request for changes at police stations. Under the 1956 law on the exercise of political rights, registration using the voting card is allowed between only 1 November and 31 January every year. Citizens 18 years or older must register themselves during this time at the nearest police station to their homes. According to the same law, the Ministry of Interior must create and revise voters' lists every year. On 24 October, the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, an advocacy NGO, filed a complaint to the Administrative Court against the HEC and the minister of interior for not implementing the 2006 amendments to the 1956 law which includes using the national ID system in preparing the voters' lists. The complaint said the "discrepancies in the database used by the Ministry of Interior, which has hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, are registered using only their first and second names and opens the door to electoral fraud by allowing the same person to cast ballots repeatedly in different places." At the beginning of the year Qomsan announced that the ministry had revised the voters' lists and removed 349,000 voters who died last year, but civil society organisations fear the real number of "dead voters" is far greater. Over the last few months, opposition figures have been calling for changing the voting system by using the national ID, but government officials have said such an amendment should be approved by parliament. "Using the national ID in voting needs an amendment to the law which is the job of the parliament. The government will do everything to make the process fair and successful," Ahmed Darwish, state minister for administrative development, said in August. But legal experts told Al-Ahram Weekly that the decision taken by the HEC is legal, and that there was no need for any amendments to the 1956 law as the HEC is mandated by the law to "ask the Ministry of Interior to take measures it sees necessary to make the process fair and transparent."
