CAIRO: The results of run-offs in Egypt's first post-Mubarak presidential election will be announced before the end of June, the supervising committee said on Sunday. Farouk Sultan, head of the Supreme Presidential Election Committee, said in a press conference Sunday that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked that the voting process for Egyptians living abroad take place for two weeks. The vote counting process will take an additional week due to the small number of diplomats and the difficulty in sending the ballots by mail, he added. “We will postpone the announcement of the specific timeline for the election until we reach a set plan for Egyptians abroad [to vote], to allow them to participate in determining the future of their country,” Sultan said. Sources told the media before the conference that the presidential election will be held in the first week of June, Reuters reported. “Presidential election begin in the first week of June and the president will be sworn in by the end of June,” committee member Ahmed Shams El-Din told Reuters. “Any run-offs will take place within the month of June, and by July we will have an Egyptian president,” he said. Initially, the voting process for Egyptians abroad was set to take five days including three for voting and two for counting, before the election starts in Egypt. Sultan said that according to the foreign ministry, the number of voters abroad is expected to exceed 1 million in the presidential election, which will be held in one phase, unlike the parliamentary elections which took place over three stages. Mass protests and marches have been held recently demanding the immediate handover of power from the military council to a civilian authority and for earlier presidential election. However, Sultan said, “We don't take decisions based on the demands of the streets. We are guided by the law and by the appropriate circumstances to accommodate the election.” Registration for presidential candidates will begin on March 10 and end April 8. Independent candidates must secure the support of 30,000 eligible voters from 15 of Egypt's 27 provinces to be able to run. The number of supporters in each province has to be at least 1,000. Alternatively, they are eligible if they are endorsed by 30 Members of Parliament. According to the law, presidential candidates can hold only Egyptian nationality and their parents and spouse must be Egyptian. Sultan stressed that the commission was completely independent from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has been ruling the country since Mubarak's ouster in February 2011. "The committee will not allow any authority whatsoever to make decisions on its behalf," he said. He also stressed that the People's Assembly has no authority to amend Article 28 of the law governing presidential elections, which guarantees immunity for the supervising committee's members. Anas Gaafar, deputy dean of the faculty of law at Cairo University, supported Sultan's statement, saying that this article was first mentioned in the constitutional decree issued last year. "The PA has no authority to amend the constitutional decree," Gaafar told Daily News Egypt. SCAF had issued the presidential elections law on Jan. 19, days before the PA convened for the first time on Jan. 23. MPs were outraged and demanded to review the law. "Parliament has the right to review all laws or declarations issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces," General Mamdouh Shahin told reporters last month. Voters will cast their ballots at polling stations in their designated constituencies, according to their national ID cards, similar to the voting process in parliamentary elections. "This is to guarantee that voters won't cast their ballots twice as the ink used isn't sufficient," Mazen Hassan, professor of electoral systems in Cairo University, told DNE. Under new rules approved in a referendum last year, presidential terms will be limited to two consecutive four-year terms.
