The presidential campaigns of Mohamed Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq are locked in a battle of elections violations with more than a hundred violations filed with the Presidential Election Committee (PEC) as a contentious ballot-count of the results is underway to determine the country’s next president.
“We filed 140 appeals to the electoral committee.” Yasser Aly, official spokesperson of the Morsi campaign told the Daily News Egypt. “One hundred of them were accepted.”
According to Aly, the appeals are mainly regarding common violations during the electoral process in different polling stations throughout several Egyptian governorates. The violations include bribery, circulating pre-selected ballots and campaigning outside of voting centres.
The campaign of Ahmed Shafiq announced that they have filed several appeals as well, noting similar complaints that they believe will confirm their claim on Tuesday afternoon that Shafiq is the actual victor of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential elections.
Civil rights activist Rami Ghanem, a member of the political office of the Justice and Democracy National Front, expects that appeals filed by both candidates regarding ballot-counting might produce some surprises when the elections are officially announced on Thursday.
The electoral committee maintains that the official results will be announced on Thursday, after all the appeals have been considered.
International observers reported election violations during the run-off round, including the discovery of preselected ballots, which were marked next to the names of candidates without an attribution to a registered voter. The Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA) also reported difficulties in observing as well as an overall low turnout.
