CAIRO: Results trickled in of the first elections of the Engineers’ Syndicates in 16 years, indicating substantial gains for Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidates.
The syndicate has been under legal guardianship since 1995. Friday’s elections were marked with visibly high turnout, although numbers are yet to confirm that.
“We all wish that decent people head the syndicate, regardless of whoever they turn out to be,” said Bahgat Ali Ismail, Cairo-branch syndicate council candidate and electromechanical-works consultant.
“Engineers have awareness now … and if anyone makes an unpopular decision, the general assembly can always withdraw confidence from the council if it feels they’re heading in the wrong direction. “
The elections were contested chiefly by two significant blocs, the Independence list headed by Tarek Al-Nabarawy, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Rally list headed by Maged Kholousy, in addition to several other minor blocs.
Indicators late Friday and Saturday showed that the Rally list was leading in races for the top seat in governorate branches, winning at least 14 out of the 23 districts. The Independence list was leading in Cairo.
However, Ramez Kamal, election monitor at the Shams Club, the Heliopolis poll station, and engineer at Motorola, noted that some indicators were misleading. “The Muslim Brotherhood victory is mostly a media bluff, as Kholousy was ahead of Al-Nabarawy only by an estimated margin of 1,000 votes in the 14 districts.”
Kamel claimed that in his station, Al-Nabarawy was ahead of Kholousy by at least five times, “my sub-station had 214 voters, while the whole Shams Club station an estimate of 10,000, so we alone could’ve made up for that difference.”
As of 2010, there are over 362,000 registered syndicate members, with 37 percent in Cairo, 14 percent in Alexandria, and 12 percent in Giza, leaving less than half the voters distributed over the rest of the electoral districts.
Ismail also noted that while the Rally was winning the branch chief seats, it wasn’t dominating in the elections in these branches’ councils, predicting an even finish between Al-Nabarawy and Kholousy for the syndicate chief seat.
Queues of voters
With high turnout, queues stretched for almost a hundred meters outside respective poll-stations. The day, however, was disturbed with organizational problems.
“We started almost an hour-and-a-half late,” said Ramez Kamal, election monitor at the Shams Club, the Heliopolis poll station, and engineer at Motorola, “And this wasn’t just at our station, but almost all over the country.”
Ragui Hicham, who voted at Az-Zera’in Club in Mohandessin, agreed. “I was there before voting started at 9:30 am; I left at 2:00 pm.”
Kamal noted that even though the vote started late, all poll stations still closed at 5 pm.
He said that the process was unorganised, as the electronic registration system went down and monitors were unable to make any background checks, or to cross-check the registered voters with the sorting sheets, or to make sure voters hadn’t erased the ink and voted elsewhere earlier.
While there was judicial presence for monitoring the election, he continued, the judges themselves didn’t understand the process, “not to mention that the administrative employees that were supposed to assist the voters didn’t understand it either.”
Other problems resulted from the manual counting of ballots, which according to Kamal can result in lots of errors such as miscounts and overlooking invalid votes, which eventually led to delaying the announcement of the results beyond the expected 24 hours.
“You’re supposed to check a large sheet with several categories in a very brief period of time; mistakes are bound to happen,” Kamal said. “I only left the poll station after counting at 11 pm.”
Ismail also recounted a similar situation at the main syndicate headquarters in Downtown Cairo, where the voting process was delayed because of additional logistical difficulties.
“There was confusion in the morning because nobody notified the people that their polling stations were divided according to their specialization, so they didn’t know where to go to vote,” Ismail explained.
The syndicate is divided into seven specializations, with four major (architecture and civil, electrical and mechanical engineering), and three minor (chemical and nuclear, petroleum and mining and textile engineering).
Ismail also added that the process itself was slow, as each individual was expected to vote in five separate ballots: the syndicate chief, the supplementary members list, the specialization list, the syndicate branch chief, and the syndicate branch council.
“Add to all of that another six ballots for each other specialization and you have 11 ballots per station,” Ismail said.
Kamal said that in spite of the technical difficulties, there were no major hurdles or accounts of fraud to note, as “the mess was affecting everyone.”
On the other hand, Mohamed Seifallah Aboul-Naga, son and campaign representative of candidate Seifallah Aboul-Naga, said the elections were affected by “funding and media factors”.
“The Independence (bloc) printed almost 1 million flyers, more than double the number of registered syndicate members, not to mention the Muslim Brotherhood’s old and tested tactics, so it’s not exactly a fair game,” he said.
“There are large gaps in media coverage and funding. … In the run-up to this election, ONTV singled out only the Rally and the Independence lobbies as the serious parties and ignored all other runners in the race.”
He noted however that this wasn’t exclusive to the syndicate elections but an inherent structural problem of the media in Egypt in general.
Election results were scheduled to be announced in press conference on Friday night, but have been delayed. They were not announced by press time on Sunday.
