Turnout 38%, but 98% back Egypt charter

CAIRO: More than 98 percent of Egyptians backed a new constitution in a referendum, authorities said on Saturday, though the turnout was lower than some officials had predicted, with just over a third of the electorate taking part.
Voters supported the constitution by 98.1 percent, said the head of the supreme election committee, Nabil Salib. A total of 38.6 percent of eligible voters took part, he told reporters.
The vote held Tuesday and Wednesday is a milestone for Egypt’s interim government, installed by the military after the ouster last July of President Muhammad Mursi.
The draft is also a key piece of a political roadmap toward new elections for a president and a test of public opinion about the coup that removed Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood. It is a heavily amended version of a constitution written by Mursi’s allies and ratified in December 2012 with some 64 percent of the vote but with a nationwide turnout of just over 30 percent.
Mursi’s Brotherhood boycotted the referendum while the country’s second-largest hard-liner group, the ultraconservative Salafis, also stayed away from the polls in response to a crackdown against hard-liners that included confiscation of their assets, shutdown of their TV networks and the banning of their top clerics from preaching in mosques.
This left traditional radical strongholds across Egypt seeing only a trickle of voters during the two-day balloting.
By contrast and raising the prospects of a continued polarization among Egyptians, long lines formed outside polling stations in major urban areas and big cities, with crowds brandishing posters of the country’s military chief, chanting in support of the army and women ululating.
Such patriotic outbursts followed an intense campaign by the government and the overwhelmingly pro-military media, which portrayed the balloting as key to the nation’s security and stability.
In the weeks before the vote, hundreds of thousands of fliers, posters, banners and billboards urged Egyptians to vote “yes” in the referendum and people were arrested for posters and campaigns calling for a “no” vote.