jafar00
05-29-2014, 10:43 PM
Congratulations to Egypt on "voting" in their new oppressive dictator with 95% of the vote.
CAIRO — Egypt’s presidential election fell short of international standards of democracy, two teams of foreign observers said Thursday, a day after the former military officer who led last summer’s military takeover won a landslide victory with more than 95 percent of the vote.
“Egypt’s repressive political environment made a genuinely democratic presidential election impossible,” Eric Bjornlund, president of Democracy International (http://democracyinternational.com/), an election-monitoring organization funded by the United States, said in a statement. In an interview, he called the political context “hugely troubling.”
A team of European Union observers said in a statement that, despite guarantees in Egypt’s Constitution, respect for the essential freedoms of association and expression “falls short of these constitutional principles.” Robert Goebbels, a Luxembourg member of the European Parliament, summarized the voting process as “free but not always very fair,” noting the winner’s overwhelming advantage in both financial resources and news media attention.
The winner, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army field marshal, was universally perceived as the candidate of the state, the political establishment and the business elite, and his victory had been so widely expected that it was almost a formality.
Election officials said Thursday that Mr. Sisi’s only opponent, Hamdeen Sabahi, had won less than 3 percent of the vote. He finished basically tied with the number of ballots that had been defaced to protest what critics called the undemocratic climate and limited choices.
Supporters of Mr. Sisi counted on the election to legitimize his leadership after the military ouster last summer of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, considered Egypt’s first fairly elected leader.
Officials said Thursday that about 47 percent of the roughly 54 million eligible voters had cast ballots, giving Mr. Sisi 23.9 million votes. By comparison, Mr. Morsi received about 13.2 million votes in 2012, in a close and competitive race against another former general, Ahmed Shafik.
The strong turnout followed days of public hand-wringing about the apparent emptiness of the polling stations. The absence of voters was so conspicuous on the first two scheduled days of balloting that election officials took the extraordinary step of adding a third day at the last minute, to strengthen the total turnout.
Both teams of foreign observers faulted the last-minute addition of a third day as a needless irregularity that raised doubts about the credibility of the process and the independence of the election authorities.
Mr. Bjornlund of Democracy International said his observers had seen no impediments to voting on the first two days that might have justified a third day, and the European Union delegation said the third day “caused unnecessary uncertainty in the electoral process.”
Egyptian officials said supervision of the government’s High Presidential Election Commission, composed of senior judges, was politically independent and assured the integrity of the vote. But in previous Egyptian elections the best checks on fraud were parallel counts by independent political groups — principally the Muslim Brotherhood — as well as the close monitoring of representatives of opposing campaigns.
Now, the Brotherhood, which dominated Egyptian elections through its political arm over the previous three years, has been outlawed and repressed. On the night before the added day of voting, the Sabahi campaign withdrew its monitors from the polls, complaining that security forces there were excluding, assaulting and arresting them.
As a result, Mr. Bjornlund said, the turnout or vote count could not be confirmed by the relatively small observer missions.
“We do not know what the turnout for this election was,” he said. Democracy International’s 86 monitoring teams did not see a large turnout, he said, but the group “has no means to evaluate it.”
At least one judge on the election commission has publicly questioned some fundamental tenets of democracy. In the run-up to Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the judge, Nabil Salib, argued in a newspaper column that democratic elections were unsuitable for Egypt because so many Egyptians were poor and uneducated.
“I argue for canceling elections” until “illiteracy vanishes, citizens’ living conditions are secured at least to a minimum standard, their will is liberated and their culture is sophisticated,” he wrote, recommending that a committee of judges and intellectuals choose the leaders. “Canceling elections is the beginning of the real road to reform and the first correct step in the thousand miles path.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/middleeast/international-observers-find-fault-with-egypt-vote.html
CAIRO — Egypt’s presidential election fell short of international standards of democracy, two teams of foreign observers said Thursday, a day after the former military officer who led last summer’s military takeover won a landslide victory with more than 95 percent of the vote.
“Egypt’s repressive political environment made a genuinely democratic presidential election impossible,” Eric Bjornlund, president of Democracy International (http://democracyinternational.com/), an election-monitoring organization funded by the United States, said in a statement. In an interview, he called the political context “hugely troubling.”
A team of European Union observers said in a statement that, despite guarantees in Egypt’s Constitution, respect for the essential freedoms of association and expression “falls short of these constitutional principles.” Robert Goebbels, a Luxembourg member of the European Parliament, summarized the voting process as “free but not always very fair,” noting the winner’s overwhelming advantage in both financial resources and news media attention.
The winner, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army field marshal, was universally perceived as the candidate of the state, the political establishment and the business elite, and his victory had been so widely expected that it was almost a formality.
Election officials said Thursday that Mr. Sisi’s only opponent, Hamdeen Sabahi, had won less than 3 percent of the vote. He finished basically tied with the number of ballots that had been defaced to protest what critics called the undemocratic climate and limited choices.
Supporters of Mr. Sisi counted on the election to legitimize his leadership after the military ouster last summer of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, considered Egypt’s first fairly elected leader.
Officials said Thursday that about 47 percent of the roughly 54 million eligible voters had cast ballots, giving Mr. Sisi 23.9 million votes. By comparison, Mr. Morsi received about 13.2 million votes in 2012, in a close and competitive race against another former general, Ahmed Shafik.
The strong turnout followed days of public hand-wringing about the apparent emptiness of the polling stations. The absence of voters was so conspicuous on the first two scheduled days of balloting that election officials took the extraordinary step of adding a third day at the last minute, to strengthen the total turnout.
Both teams of foreign observers faulted the last-minute addition of a third day as a needless irregularity that raised doubts about the credibility of the process and the independence of the election authorities.
Mr. Bjornlund of Democracy International said his observers had seen no impediments to voting on the first two days that might have justified a third day, and the European Union delegation said the third day “caused unnecessary uncertainty in the electoral process.”
Egyptian officials said supervision of the government’s High Presidential Election Commission, composed of senior judges, was politically independent and assured the integrity of the vote. But in previous Egyptian elections the best checks on fraud were parallel counts by independent political groups — principally the Muslim Brotherhood — as well as the close monitoring of representatives of opposing campaigns.
Now, the Brotherhood, which dominated Egyptian elections through its political arm over the previous three years, has been outlawed and repressed. On the night before the added day of voting, the Sabahi campaign withdrew its monitors from the polls, complaining that security forces there were excluding, assaulting and arresting them.
As a result, Mr. Bjornlund said, the turnout or vote count could not be confirmed by the relatively small observer missions.
“We do not know what the turnout for this election was,” he said. Democracy International’s 86 monitoring teams did not see a large turnout, he said, but the group “has no means to evaluate it.”
At least one judge on the election commission has publicly questioned some fundamental tenets of democracy. In the run-up to Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the judge, Nabil Salib, argued in a newspaper column that democratic elections were unsuitable for Egypt because so many Egyptians were poor and uneducated.
“I argue for canceling elections” until “illiteracy vanishes, citizens’ living conditions are secured at least to a minimum standard, their will is liberated and their culture is sophisticated,” he wrote, recommending that a committee of judges and intellectuals choose the leaders. “Canceling elections is the beginning of the real road to reform and the first correct step in the thousand miles path.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/middleeast/international-observers-find-fault-with-egypt-vote.html