Voting in Shobra el-Kheima

For those who don’t know it, Shobra el-Kheima is a vast working-class neighborhood on the outskirts, of Cairo-- so vast, in fact, it is actually part of a different province and didn't even vote with the rest of Cairo earlier this month. Its ringed by a few main paved roads, but beyond those there are just tightly packed unfinished apartment buildings divided by garbage strewn alleyways. Two million people live there.

My friend Mohammed lives out there, and on Saturday, he invited me to see an example of kind of voter intimidation that has been going on throughout the country during the second round of these parlimentary elections. When we arrived, a ring of riot police surrounded the entrance to a polling station at the Batin secondary school. A large crowd of men were gathered outside the ring. They all wanted to vote, but the security forces were preventing everyone from getting inside, and had been for hours. The men inside the cordon, plainclothes intelligence officers, police, and NDP officials, drank juice and tea and eyed the crowd blandly.

Every once and a while, the security forces closest to the wall of the school would allow a few voters to squeeze through. These were mostly Brotherhood voters, people there said. At the center of the cordon, a gap would occasionally open and let groups of other voters calmly saunter in without a hassle. These, people there said, were NDP supporters, many brought by minibus to vote.

“Freedom is being confiscated!” said Walid Abu Fatah, a broad-faced Brotherhood supporter. “As you see, soldiers prevent people from giving their votes!”

The security forces had arrived in the morning and formed the cordon after a battle had erupted between NDP and Brotherhood supporters. A gun had gone off. As the hours went on, things became tense again. The crowd of voters waiting to get inside began to chant Brotherhood slogans. Posters materialized. An old man came rushing up to us at a nearby cafe (we had retreated after a while to watch from a distance.) He was beside himself--his wife had gone to vote at a nearby polling station, only to find that someone had already voted in her name. When she complained, she was threatened by the judge there--who said he would hit her and put her in prison if she didn’t leave. "There is corruption in this election!" he shouted to us, looking to me in the hope that I had the power to somehow stop all of the chicanery. "They take pride in the cheating, in making the National Party win!” His name was Shouki Awed Ashur Zaidan, he was the father of five.

Meanwhile, at other polling stations, things were comparatively calm. Apparently four polling stations, all in areas thought to be Brotherhood strongholds, were blocked by police, while voting at others continued. We met a judge supervising one poll who expressed frustration that his authority ended at the door to the classroom where he was signing in voters. Within his tiny area of responsibility, he tried to keep the election clean.

Many of the problems had been set into motion well before election day, and that, as the outside of the station, was out of the hands of all poll workers. Throughout the parliamentary vote, I've talked to judges and poll workers who estimate that at least some 30 percent of the names on the voting lists are incorrect. My friend Mohammed couldn't vote, for example, because a silent letter in Arabic, the tarmabuta, was missing from the end of the spelling of his last name. His cousin, an NDP supporter, couldn't vote for a similar reason.

We interviewed the MB candidate in the district before leaving. Gamal Mahmoud Shata was a squarely built guy who seemed a bit new to his olive suit and striped tie. As he moved though the polling station, greeting the workers, many shook his hands proudly. Two women murmured, May god support you.

“The government didn’t project that we will succeed in this way. When it happened, they lost their minds. They will do anything to prevent this win in the elections,” the candidate said.

The MB has support even among the bureaucrats, even within the polling stations themselves. Young enthusiastic supporters of the MB, both men and women, stood in front of polling places, sometimes putting their arms around voters and whispering in their ears right up to the ballot boxes. Despite the blocked polls and intimidation in Shobra el-Kheima, the Brotherhood candidate ultimately won. And this was the case in districts throughout Egypt.

It is for that reason that the Brothers have thrust those of us who want democracy for Egypt into a kind of dilemma. We believe in one man one vote. We believe that people should be allowed to vote for who they want to win, and that the candidate who gets the most votes should be declared the victor. And yet we don’t know whether the Brothers are playing the populist card of religion for power alone. They say they will play the role of a responsible government opposition, pushing for the end of corruption, for change that will benefit the system as a whole. Is such a hope realistic in a system such as this one? From where would they have learned anything but winner take all politics?