CAIRO - “I miss the days of Mubarak!" A colleague said seriously the other day. "How come?!" I asked in astonishment. "Because his regime spared us the trouble of having to go to the polls by doing the voting for us!" he explained jokingly. I remembered this sarcastic remark as I went, accompanied by my wife and elder daughter, to cast our ballots on the constitutional changes on Saturday. It was the first vote in post-Mubarak Egypt and the first time I've ever voted in a referendum. Apart from the elections for the Press Syndicate and the institution that publishes The Egyptian Gazette and its weekly edition, the Egyptian Mail, I have never voted in a public poll. Like many Egyptians, I had no inclination to show up for a public vote, because I was firmly convinced that there were no guarantees that my vote would not be tampered with. The legislative elections held late last year, in which Mubarak's party (the formerly ruling National Democratic Party) was shamelessly given more than 90 per cent of the seats up for grabs, substantiated this conviction. The balloting was massively rigged amid large-scale vote buying and violence, according to local monitoring groups. Under amendments introduced in 2007, judges were barred from overseeing those elections, which, for many observers in Egypt, were the last nail in the coffin of the then governing party and the Mubarak regime. The situation was totally different last Saturday. It was the first taste of democracy for Egyptians, like me, who are now sure that their votes count. Everyone at the polling station at a school in northern Cairo, from the soldiers on guard outside, to employees handling the ballot papers, was smiling. Though the queue for voters was a very long one, no-one grumbled. They were all eager to experience something new and thrilling – free voting. People only had to show their ID cards, something which encouraged a large number of Egyptians to go to the polls. As I stood in the queue on Saturday for around one hour another voter, who apparently had a sense of humour, recalled a popular joke from the Mubarak years. "An Egyptian man dared tick ‘No' on his ballot paper and dropped it into the box. Back home, he confessed to his wife that he was afraid he would be punished for this. His wife advised him to go back immediately to the polling station and change his ‘No' to ‘Yes'. “So he went back and a police officer sternly asked him what was the problem. ‘I mistakenly ticked ‘No' and I want to change it to ‘Yes',' he told the officer submissively. ‘Don't worry, we've already changed it for you. But don't do it again!' the officer warned him.”
