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Africa: North
Vote totals lower for Egyptians than for Democrats
2005-09-08
CAIRO - The polling station was waiting for voters, but 150 meters (492 feet) up the road, Walid Ali couldn’t be bothered to cast his ballot. He was playing dominoes at a pavement table outside a coffee shop. “I’m not sure it’s fair,” Ali said of Egypt’s first-ever presidential election, “and (President Hosni) Mubarak has already won it.”

The belief that the results of Wednesday’s election were fixed appeared widespread as a reporter for The Associated Press walked Cairo’s streets randomly interviewing people. Egyptians are long leery of their political system, which has been widely criticized as corrupt and out-of-reach to ordinary people. Few doubt Mubarak could lose, considering he has run Egypt for 24 years. “I’ve longed for an election like this,” Ali Gamel Eldin, a young computer programmer, said of Wednesday’s polls, the first in which Egyptians have a choice of presidential candidate. “But in this election the results are already known.”
Well duh.
Others said they wanted to vote but didn’t because they had not received the mandatory voter registration card to lodge their ballots. Yasser Noaman, a laboratory technician, said he even called a telephone number published in Egyptian newspapers to get his card, but there was no answer.

And there were those who didn’t want to vote but did only to escape paying a fine of 100 Egyptian pounds (US$17.30) for not doing so. In the narrow dirt streets of western Cairo’s low-income neighborhood of Imbaba, driver Ibrahim Said said he was intimidated by the fine and dismissed his ballot as “making no difference.”

Khaled Mohammed, a student visiting Cairo from Banha, 70 kilometers (43 miles) to the north, was scornful of the prospect of being penalized. “I don’t think they will apply this because lots of people didn’t vote,” he said. He said he boycotted the poll because “I’m 100 percent sure that President Mubarak will win.”
I think we can get you a job in the 11th ward in Chicago.
Garment worker Khaled Ibrahim, who was finishing a takeaway meal by the side of the Nile with his girlfriend, cracked a joke when asked why he had not voted. “If I were to vote, I would choose Mubarak because he has eaten his fill, but if a new person became president he would steal a lot because he would not have money,” said Ibrahim.

Similarly, Tarek Ismail, a butchery worker standing at a bus stop in Cairo’s crowded quarter of Sayeda Zeinab, said, “If Hosni (Mubarak) were not a candidate, I would have gone to vote.”

Aza Mohammed Baha, a mother of three, said she boycotted in protest against the whole system and a common view than none of the 10 candidates, including Mubarak, were viable. “We didn’t vote because we have no faith in the election,” she said. “The high prices, and everything that we cannot afford, has made us lose faith in the polls and all the candidates.”

Many boycotters said they were scared of getting into trouble if they explained why they had not voted. One changed her reason for not voting after being asked her name. “Are you going to get us imprisoned?” said another nonvoter.
Posted by:Steve White

#3  â€œThe high prices, and everything that we cannot afford, has made us lose faith in the polls and all the candidates.”

*Sigh* Mr. Wife claims he can't afford to buy me those lovely 1 carat diamond earrings I want. So I'm losing faith in democracy, too.
Posted by: trailing wife   2005-09-08 12:56  

#2  Reminds me of the old joke.

American: "America's technology allows is to know the name of our President just six minutes after ballot closure"

Mexican: "That is nothing. We know the name of ours more than six months before the election"
Posted by: JFM   2005-09-08 08:13  

#1  "Few doubt Mubarak could lose, considering he has run Egypt for 24 years."

I can shout, don't hear you.
Posted by: .com   2005-09-08 03:48  

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