CAIRO: Although the first of three regional rounds of Egypt's parliamentary elections promises to become a success story in voter turnout, various problems surrounding the election system and voting process will likely have a negative impact on the credibility and validity of the elections. The first of these problems concerns the unclear role of international observers in the current elections. Undoubtedly, an international election observation mission would help the credibility of the election turnout and contribute to the stabilization of the current delicate political situation. Still, back in July, Egypt's council of military rulers announced they will not allow international monitors to observe the parliamentary elections, as a matter of rejection of foreign intervention into the country's sovereignty. Yet, they seem to have backed down recently, allowing some civil society organizations and NGOs such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), The Carter Center, the International Republican Institute and South African, Turkish, Polish and Danish groups to observe the elections. According to a Reuters report, 300 foreign civil society representatives and 25,000 accredited monitors came in over the last week. Yet many of them have expressed concern that their participation might offer false legitimacy to the election process they have little influence on. Les Campbell of the Washington based NDI, who is in Cairo as an election witness, sees the role of international observers more in amplifying the decisions of Egypt's people, rather than in defining what is legitimate in the process and what isn't. A lack of clarity regarding foreign coverage and observation also persisted during election day. When a CBS News crew tried to shoot video of the actual voting yesterday, the army officers struggled with the question whether they could allow this. They finally did. Yet another problem concerns the very fragmentary information flow from authorities to the electorate, combined with an extremely complex electoral law. Western election observers have been calling the voting system complicated, contradictory and non-transparent. According to one: “The larger problem is that many procedures for the actual conduct of the voting remain undefined and could be interpreted and implemented differently in every polling center.” Among the voters, confusion and lack of information about the process is significant. For example, a lack of clarity persists concerning timing of when the High Electoral Commission (HEC) will announce the poll results. The question of timing is particularly important because the voting process is stretches out for over four months. Many observers fear that if the results are not released right away, the possibility of fraud increases. But releasing election results or portions thereof before the end of the four month entails the risk that these results will impact on voting behavior and therefore change the outcome. Additionally, until very recently, Egyptians living abroad were left in the open on how their votes would be collected and particularly to what districts they would be apportioned to. According to Joshua Hersh from Huffington Post, the government has suggested that they would let voters abroad self-indicate which district their votes would go to, and trust them to be honest. Yet another major problem are the frequent changes – mostly at short notice – of the voting rules. According to Les Campbell, rules are changing every day – even up to election day. So was the decision to expand voting to two days instead of one announced on the HECs Facebook page only three days before elections started. BM
