CAIRO, 9 September 2005 — One day after Egyptians voted in a multiparty presidential election for the first time, the event became mired in controversy yesterday and the ruling National Democratic Party was accused of rigging the vote in favor of its candidate, the incumbent President Hosni Mubarak.

Meanwhile the ballot count began yesterday and President Mubarak was reported heading for a landslide win.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said Egypt’s first contested presidential election silenced those who doubted its democratic intentions. “The poll that took place in Egypt refutes the case made by those who claim Egypt is unstable and question its march toward the future,” he told reporters after meeting President Mubarak. Prince Saud handed Mubarak a letter from Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah.

Presidential candidate Ayman Nour, head of Al-Ghad (Tomorrow) party, announced that he would seek a re-run, claiming the election procedures were fraudulent, altogether undemocratic and lacking in transparency. In his official complaint to the Presidential Election Commission, he described the process as “unfortunately skewed, using illegitimate means in favor of the NDP candidate.”

But a spokesman for the commission, whose decisions are final and immune from any court rulings, said it found all of Nour’s complaints baseless.

“The commission checked the request and ended up rejecting the request,” spokesman Osama Atawia told a news conference.

“The commission concluded that the facts referred to in the request were untrue,” he said, adding that names and numbers of polling stations were inaccurate.

Earlier, Hisham Qassem of Al-Ghad said that “various problems arose, among which was the fact that certain individuals were able to vote without presenting their voting cards, while this card had initially been announced (by the Ministry of Interior) as a prerequisite. When Al-Ghad representatives noted this, they confronted the voters who were placing their ballots without their cards. The voters simply replied that they had been contacted by the NDP and that they had been told that they would have no problem with voting.”

In addition, Qassem complained that while NDP members were allowed to operate freely at the electoral colleges and canvass voters for a vote in favor of the ruling party candidate, Al-Ghad and Al-Wafd members were banned from the premises of the polling stations.

While the Supreme Court forbade international, independent monitors from overseeing the electoral procedure, various local human rights bodies sent monitors to the polling stations. Among them was Emad Mubarak, lawyer at the prestigious Hisham Mubarak Law Center. He backed oppositions claims of fraud, saying that “there were many problems worthy of note. To start with, employers at the Dokki and Agouza polling stations were wearing T-shirts featuring photographs of Mubarak. Posters of Mubarak were put up on the walls of the colleges and inside the polling stations. At polling stations which were inside police stations, security officials stood near voters and controlled their movements. All of this can be considered to be out of line with what a real democratic, free election should be.”

Official results of the vote will be declared tomorrow, but an election commission official said President Mubarak had polled over 70 percent of the vote. Nour followed with 12 percent while Noaman Gomaa of the Wafd party took 5 to 7 percent.