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An Egyptian Voter's Lament

(Foreign Policy) Mohamed El Dahshan - Outside my polling station in Heliopolis in the east of Cairo, some volunteer "popular committee for election security," with the army and police's explicit approval, were organizing the lines while handing out flyers for the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). The FJP had set up a full-fledged booth 10 meters away from the station, despite rules forbidding any campaigning within 100 meters of the polls. (When I asked both the army officer in charge of security outside and the judge supervising the vote inside the station, both told me a variant of: "It makes little difference, people here know what they're voting for anyway." Inside the polling station, where two well-meaning polling officials insisted that I stand and fill my ballots on the window sill "to save time," I insisted on doing it behind the metal curtain set up for this purpose.
2011-12-02 00:00:00
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