Egyptian Voters Impeded In Opposition Strongholds

Washington Post ^ | June 12, 2007 | Ellen Knickmeyer

[Lorianne]

Egyptian security forces barred voters from entering polling centers in opposition areas Monday during the first national elections since the U.S.-backed government of President Hosni Mubarak pushed through constitutional changes that analysts say were intended to keep the Muslim Brotherhood from power.

In Awseem, a dusty town north of Cairo that is a Brotherhood stronghold, security officers lined up behind chest-high plastic riot shields to block all entrances to a locked polling place. Officers clenching automatic rifles alongside a row of police wagons effectively sealed off another voting site.

Residents in other towns around Egypt on Monday complained of police turning them from the polls and occasionally beating them. One person was killed in election-related violence, the Associated Press reported.

In areas loyal to Mubarak's National Democratic Party, voters surged into polling sites. In Bortos, also north of Cairo, a girl of 15 said she cast a ballot for the NDP, and children who appeared much younger than the voting age of 18 waved fingers stained with the pink ink used to mark ballots and boasted that they had voted.

"See him?" a young man shouted from the window of a bus as he and others rode away from the polling site. He reached out to slap a poster, taped to the bus, of the governing party's candidate in Bortos. "This NDP guy is going to win, either way!" the man shouted.

A national referendum in March approved constitutional amendments, championed by Mubarak, that gave limited legislative authority to parliament's upper house, which was previously an advisory body. Other changes enshrined legal prohibitions against religiously based political parties, removed requirements that judges supervise voting in elections, made it easier for the president to dissolve parliament and allowed the suspension of constitutional civil liberties in cases the government deems involve terrorism.

[edcoil]

This looks like a job for Mighty Jimmy.

Paging Jimmy Carter, paging Jimmy Carter.

[pnh102]

We have to hope that Hosni pulls this one off. At the very least he pays lip service to the USA and fights his own fight against Islamic fundamentalism, even if he is a brutal dictator. If the Muslim Brotherhood wins, the Egyptian people will still live under a dictatorship, but we will now have a new enemy in the War on Terror.

[2banana]

Sounds like Philadelphia on election day (with also the dead voting)...

[A message]

Officers clenching automatic rifles alongside a row of police wagons effectively sealed off another voting site.

Isn't this what Ken Blackwell and GOP stormtroopers did to po'po' ole John Kerry in Ohio in '06 ???

Yes I'm being very very sarcastic because Dummycrats don't have a clue when they disingenuously claim voters were turned away.