CAIRO: Egypt's legislative elections for both the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament will be held on the same day in the second half of November, head of the newly-established Supreme Electoral Commission Ibrahim Abdel-Mo'ez said Monday evening. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces appointed Abdel-Mo'ez to head the commission, which will start the electoral process on Sept. 18. State-run Al-Akhbar daily said on Tuesday that the People's Assembly and the Shoura Council laws, which regulate the elections and specify the electoral system, will be issued before the end of the week, quoting General Mamdouh Shahin, member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. "The commission will [shortly] start forming general committees for elections as well as committees for voting and sorting," Abdel-Mo'ez, also president of the Cairo Appeals Court, said in a telephone interview with ON TV's Baladna Bil Masry talk show. According to Abdel-Mo'ez, the voters' lists will be revised based on national ID numbers and filtered from any suspicious data like the deceased and citizens not who are not allowed vote. "We [officially] called on courts and prosecution offices to inform us of the names of citizens who had been handed down court verdicts," he told TV host Reem Maguid. The elections of both the People's Assembly (the Lower-House) and the Shoura Council (the Upper-House) will be held simultaneously, each overlooked by different judges and allocated different ballot boxes. Moreover, the general secretariat will also set a ceiling for funding electoral campaigns. Abdel-Mo'ez confirmed that the interior ministry will not interfere in the operations of the commission as was the case notoriously before the January uprising that toppled ex-president Hosni Mubarak. During the Mubarak regime, political groups and rights organizations accused the Interior Ministry of vote-rigging in favor of members of the then ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) headed by Mubarak. At the time, the police had full control over the electoral process. Ibrahim said voters' lists will no longer be on paper. Rather, the new lists will be part of an electronic database, organized alphabetically and according to national ID numbers. "This is the first step towards real democracy," he explained. The commission will meet on Saturday to form a general secretariat of judges who will work on the polls. Later next week, the commission judges will receive training on running the electoral process in cooperation with Cairo University's faculty of political science. Other training sessions will be held at the National Judges' Institute. Earlier in March, SCAF announced that that parliamentary elections will be held in September. But later in July, the council announced a delay till October or November. The election date has been the subject of debate for months, with some calling political currents calling for elections to be postponed in order to give newly established parties enough time to organize. SCAF members have frequently said the council was eager to hand over power to a civil authority after the presidential polls, to be held within two months of parliamentary elections.
