CAIRO, 3 July 2005 — Egyptian judges said yesterday that vote counting of the May 25 referendum on the constitutional amendment to allow multicandidate presidential elections was marred by widespread fraud.
According to official figures, almost 83 percent of voters in 329 main polling stations and 50,000 branches across the country approved the amendment to the constitution. The turnout was 53 percent of the 32.5 million registered voters.
“After investigating the results and according to the evidences we obtained, the results announced by the Ministry of Interior were falsified,” said a report released by the Cairo Judges’ Syndicate. “Ninety-five percent of polling stations were supervised by civil servants, who were intimidated by police, and were the scene of fraud. The 8, 000 registered judges only supervised five percent of the 54, 530 polling stations in the country as the voting occurred in one day,” the judges said.
The nine-page report said that in the polling stations supervised by the judges, turnout was low and in many cases did not surpass three percent while in the polling stations supervised by civil servants “turnout was in the excess of 90 percent and even reached 100 percent in some cases.”
“When asked by judges about their interpretation of these unrealistic turnout figures, some civil servants remained silent and others said they had received instructions” from the police, the report said.
Officials at the Ministry of Interior told Arab News that the judges forgot that the turnout in southern governorates was high not because of fraud but due to the fact that people were interested in voting. “In some Upper Egypt governorates the turnout was surprisingly very high even in stations supervised by judicial committees,” one official said.
Muhammad Al-Sayyed Said, a political analyst at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies said ironically the officials’ statement proves that there was no transparent voting process. “Logically, the turnout should have been higher in main governorates like Cairo and Giza... the only reason for having higher turnout in southern governorates is that the government somehow paid people to go and vote yes,” said Said. “It was easier to convince them since people there are less educated,” he told Arab News.
Egyptian judges have called for new laws to ensure the independence of the judiciary and the transparency of the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.
A new draft law presented to Parliament grants judges independence from the executive by excluding it from monitoring either the presidential or the parliamentary elections.
“This law has to be passed in the current parliamentary session... otherwise we abstain from supervising any future elections and we are serious about what we are saying,” said the statement released by the judges.
