The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) garnered 80 seats of the mid-term Shura Council (the Upper House of Egypt's Parliament) vote, while four partisans and four independent hopefuls won the other eight, the head of an electoral commission said Wednesday. "The NDP has got six seats in the run-off raising its turnout to 80 as the independent candidates got four seats in the Tuesday run-off which was held on Tuesday," said Judge Intisar Nassim, the head of the Higher Electoral Commission. Nassim added that the vote went smoothly despite some complaints by the candidates, which proved to be "groundless after investigations". Monitors from a civil society organisation, meanwhile, said they were eyewitnesses of vote fraud in the Upper Egyptian governorates of Sohag and Qena, while the polling stations closed earlier in Aswan and the Red Sea governorates. "The fraud was evident in some areas in favour of candidates from the ruling party," New World for Development and Human Rights, an NGO, said in a statement. In the first round, the NDP won 74 seats ��" 14 in constituencies that were not contested as well as sixty others by votes cast. The Tagammu, Nasserite and Generation opposition parties each won a seat. The banned Muslim Brotherhood did not win any seats in the vote. Turnout is usually low in the Shura vote, partly because constituencies are larger than for the Lower House of Parliament and many Egyptians have little knowledge of who is running.
