Egyptian Election Results Due Tomorrow
The slow motion election continues at least one more day.
Via the BBC: Egypt presidential poll results ‘due on Sunday’
The delayed results of Egypt’s presidential run-off will be announced on Sunday, the election commission has said.
It has been considering appeals by the two candidates – Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood and the former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq.
[…]
Results from the run-off election were originally due out on Thursday.
“Faruk Sultan, the head of the presidential election commission, will announce the results of the presidential election run-off on Sunday at 3:00pm (13:00 GMT),” the commission’s secretary general, Hatem Bagato, said in a statement.
This process can be added to the list of blunders by the military government insofar as any delay in a major vote count will guarantee widespread speculation about fraud. Further, we have now gone a week with both sides believing that they have won. As such, this is just a recipe for the losing side to erupt once results are announced (it isn’t as if Egyptians have been shy about mass protests of late). In fact:
Muslim Brotherhood supporters are maintaining a vigil in Tahrir Square where on Friday tens of thousands of protesters gathered to denounce a move by Egypt’s ruling generals to seize sweeping powers.
Of course, the whole situation continues to indicate that the military has no intentions of a real transition (but the whole dissolving parliament thing and official declaration of powers to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces already pretty much sealed that position). Still, the military’s behavior has been odd insofar as there are more competent ways of pretending to hand over power to elected officials without actually doing so. And if they were going to rig the presidential election (and really, perhaps they aren’t, but it is hard to tell), then there are more efficient ways to do so than this.
