Four polling places

The preliminary results are in....it's Mubarak in a landslide, with some 80 percent. Nour is the second-place finisher, with between 10 percent and 12 percent of the vote. Nour's showing was stronger than some people expected, but less than half of what he believed he would get in a fair poll. He has already sought to have the election results invalidated for reasons of fraud; the election commission (controlled by Mubarak's people) rejected the request. My sense is that there is no way they would ever dismiss the results of this poll--which took place under the ground rules set by Mubarak, and by those rules, went quite as you would think.

By now, you've likely seen the stories alleging all kinds of fraud and undue influence by Mubarak's NDP in the presidential election are well known: the NDP paid voters, bused them en masse to polling stations, offered them entrance into a lottery for cash and trips for voting, threatened to fine NDP members 100 L.E. (about $17) if they didn’t vote. In addition, the pink phosphorescent ink that was supposed to mark the fingers of people who had voted was quite easily removed. One man I spoke with late in the day said he had voted but then removed the ink with gasoline.

The visits I made to polling stations confirmed the general impression that the NDP dominated the voting process. We saw buses festooned with Mubarak banners that certainly looked as though they were taking voters to the polls (of course, U.S. political parties do a similar get-out the-vote move in the States). More disturbingly, we saw polling places overseen and staffed by NDP officials, who were open about their affiliation. In one case, men holding Mubarak signs were standing in the doorway of the school where people were voting. There were no representatives from members of other political parties: though apparently they were permitted to be there (perhaps they just didn’t have enough representatives to go around.) I saw some chaos and confusion about who was registered and whether people’s names could be found on lists.

My general impression was that few people in the society at large seemed to be voting. At 3:30 p.m., and then again at 6 p.m., I couldn’t spot a single pink finger in the crowded Metro I took back and forth from Shubra El Kheima, a very poor district at the end of the Metro line to the north of Cairo. Outside of the polling areas, I didn’t see a single pink finger on the streets. The few people I spoke to late in evening about their apparent lack of interest in voting said that, of course, they would like to vote (for Mubarak) but they had to work all day and were unable.

I would tend to think that except for the party faithful and people with government jobs, who were given time off to vote, most people did not turn out. In Shubra, based on a glance and the voting list at 4:30 p.m. or so, I guessed some 5% of voters had been to the station. Early reports from the government indicated that there was about 30% turnout in the election--but I would be shocked if those official figures did not rise: in the past, the government has always inflated the turnout figures.

Why so little interest? Mostly because there’s no real need to vote when you feel there is no contest and you know who will win. The campaign period was only three weeks, and what we heard from voters again and again is that people didn’t “know” the other candidates; how could they trust giving someone unknown so much power? What if the new president broke with America, started a war, or instigated enmity between Muslims and Christians in Egypt? In fact, this argument is logical. The presidency is so powerful here that giving it to an untested candidate would be a very scary and bold proposition. How would that person function within a bureaucracy completely dominated by the NDP? Would all those party members even listen to the dictates of the presidency? No, in fact, you could argue that it only made sense to vote for opposition candidates if you knew for sure they wouldn’t win. Unless you were a very, very brave person.

Another important factor is how divided the opposition is here. Many of the small opposition parties, especially on the left, decided not to run candidates in the election and encouraged their followers to boycott it. This was true of the Kifaya movement as well. The Muslim Brotherhood leadership, on the other hand, told its followers to vote, but not whom to vote for. The oblique insinuation was that people shouldn’t vote for leaders who were corrupt, a statement that implied, but did not directly command, a vote against Mubarak.

Ayman Nour likely attracted some protest votes, and people in the neighborhood where he is an MP and provides social services apparently turned out for him. Other voters who wanted a change likely felt more comfortable casting their vote for the Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest national political party active since the 1920s. Nour promised that he would open up the system, making the president more accountable, if he were elected. But the people had little to go on as to whether they could trust him.

My general impression was that this election was an excuse to celebrate Mubarak. In that sense, it remained a yes/no referendum on his rule. It did not have the beautiful and moving solemnity of the 2000 election in Kosovo. There, people who had only known repression and felt like they were someone becoming more human by voting would have waited in line all day to vote. In Iraq, the cameras showed the same feeling; the solemn sight of people risking their lives to make their voices heard for the first time. This election was certainly not a transition in the same sense.

What follows is a general account of my experience at four polls on Election Day:


10 a.m.
Zamalek is a rich districts with lots of embassies and foreigners--including lots of journalists. I'm living here. Two friends and I--one is originally from Egypt and translated--stopped by the voting at the School of the Arts to get a general idea the voting process.

We had no problem getting into the polling station. I said I was a journalist, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered much either way. There were a few uniformed policemen outside the polling place: we didn’t see any uniformed security at the other stations.

The mood was calm and tranquil. It was a beautiful morning, and there was a garden in the courtyard of the school. The walls of the vestibule of the voting area were covered with neat voters lists taped to the wall. Almost no one had yet voted.

And yet, there were at least 20 or so men around the polling area. Who were they? Mostly NDP officials. A man who spoke English and wore a formal suit stood in the vestibule directing voter traffic: he was an NDP official. Men (only men were voting at this station, women at a separate station) brought NDP posters into the polling place with them. People were happy to talk to us about how Mubarak was the best choice for Egypt.

“Off all the other times I can remember, this is probably the best organized election, and everything that’s been promised has been kept and done that way,” said NDP member Mohammed Kamel Wagdi, 45, a principal of a local elementary school.

In past elections, before voting he would just make a check mark next to his name. This time, they checked two forms of ID: his drivers’ license or other personal ID and his voter card. He also had to sign his name twice, once before he voted, and once after he voted.

The actual process is as follows: find your name of the list of people registered, take the ballot and mark it behind a curtain, place the ballot in the box, sign that you voted. “Its very, very fair,” Wagdi said. “They’ve made these changes and this is the first time there’s been a real election here.”

Then he repeated something we heard many times: that a vote for Mubarak was a vote for change. “Everybody who feels they really want a solution for the political problems here will vote for Hosni Mubarak,” he said.

A drastic change is not good for the role of the president, who leads the whole country, he added. An unknown leader could take the country into war, or create tensions with America. “It’s not in Egypt’s interest to be an enemy to anybody.”

The NDP official in the suit directing traffic in the polling station was even more enthusiastic for Mubarak. There will be a high voter turnout, he said. “Today there is a big tendency for people to come since they can feel real democracy is going on and their voice will count.”

“Evaluate what Mubarak has accomplished compared to the other candidates for president. I personally feel that the fact that Mubarak has been 24 years in power is not something negative, it is positive. He has gained a lot of experience. He is a very deliberative, very aware person.”

Our next stop was Bulaq, a much poorer neighborhood about a 15 minute drive from Zamalek. Here, the apartment buildings are rough and unfinished--not much more than stacks of red bricks upon concrete stages. These buildings can go up and up--in Bulaq, however, they are all about six stories or less. The narrow streets (a bit more than one car’s width) are filled with people walking and donkeys carting vegetables, with laundry and blankets hanging from the windows. Stacks of fruits and vegetables filled the local souk, an open area shaded by plastic tarps on poles.

A significant number of Christian Copts lived in the neighborhood. The priests were out walking toward the polling place, men in long black robes, small caps and scruffy beards, with beautiful black and white crosses around their necks. The archbishop of the Copts in Egypt had endorsed Mubarak, and the priests were taking their congregations to the local school to vote.

The school yard, at the corner of two alleyways, was festooned with Mubarak banners and bustling with activity. The local MP--an NDP delegate--was there, getting out the vote. There was an Arab television journalist out interviewing the priests and local authorities and creating a lot of interest. When we went to talk to the MP, we were ringed by maybe 50 people listening in…next to him, burly men in suits, but mostly, what looked like the working-class men from the neighborhood.

“Things will change for the better after this election,” the MP, Amar Zayed, said.

“I want the whole world to know that Egypt is living in the best of times. People are moving and there is action going on. It is very apparent that there will be change.”

We spoke to some of the Copt women, who had come with the rest of their congregation. They were wearing a different style of headscarf--black--or none at all, but looked neither richer nor poorer than their Muslim neighbors.

They were overwhelmingly, rapturously in support of Mubarak and crowded in to tell me so. “He’s making Egypt better for us,” one woman carrying an infant said. "He is providing medical benefits for all their children. He’s brought down the price of staple foods. And most importantly," she said, "he supports peace between Christians and Muslims.”

“We feel this is the first time there has ever been elections in our lives,” another woman said. “We just hope Mubarak wins,” another woman interrupted. “We want him to be our president forever!”

“Mubarak, Mubarak, that’s it!” another woman kept shouting.

Late in the afternoon, after I’d watched the protest of Kifaya in the central Tahrir Square (I will post on this later) we went to another polling station, in Shubra. It was about 4:30 p.m. and things were very quiet. A glance at the register indicated only about 5 % of the voters had as of yet shown up. Again, mostly Mubarak supporters, but one black-swathed widow stopped us in the street to say the polling stations were filled with undercover security men. She was voting for Nour, and felt pushed to vote for Mubarak, or not at all.

As we went from one school to another around the corner, we were followed by a burly guy in a suit from the first school. I didn't notice, but Mohammed, a lawyer and Kifaya activist who was with us at this point, did. As we got into the car to drive away, one of us said “Shukran” (Thank You) to the man that had been tailing us. “He wasn’t very happy to be discovered,” he said.