Supreme Electoral Committee - elction 'unrivalled success".

[Hafiz]

You get an idea of how impartially and professionally the election was run by the Supreme Election Committee when its head says: “the vote was an “ unrivaled success while no major political faction was pushing for a “no” vote, as many Egyptians saw approving the constitution as the first step towards restoring stability.”

Obviously he isn’t worried that almost 2 in 3 didn’t vote but it does make you wonder about his memory and maths when he says it was an unrivaled success. This man is either a liar or a fool or both because this turnout was the worst in 3 years. The turnout for for the 2011-12 Parliamentary elections was 54%. The Presidential election turnout was nearly 52%.. The turnouts in the first and second stages of the previous Presidential election were 46% and 52%. Is there no lie which is not published as truth in Egypt?

If getting the worst turnout in three years is to be judged a success by a person whose job it is to impartially conduct elections then god help Egypt. I think he meant that the result was an unrivaled success.

What can he mean by ‘no major political faction was pushing for a no vote”? Who does this man work for because he is telling the obvious porkie about the Brotherhood but also about fresh arrests of moderate Islamists campaigning for a no vote. The vote shows that Egypt is still highly polarized with little common ground and a small base for governing.

http://rt.com/news/egypt-constitution-r ... roval-833/

Other than dictatorships and rigged elections I cannot find a similar result in a so-called democracy for the purely natural reason that its very hard to get 98 out of a hundred people believing the same thing at the same time. If they are saying that 98 voted yes that would seem to mean 2% yes and invalid/informal. This doesn't make sense because informal votes are always high.

I hadn't realized that voting was compulsory but this seems not to have ever lead to turnouts representative of the spectrum of opinion.Are fines for non-voting ever applied? A proper electoral body aims to maximize participation not to tell lies about the results of elections and to leak like a sieve whilst the vote is underway. I think its safe to assume that their Supremanesses (or should it be Supremacists) are highly politicized as is their Commission.

Not everyone agrees with his Supremeness but no-one is saying that it was obviously rigged:

The U.S.-based Carter Centre, which has monitored most of the votes held over the past three years of political upheaval, sent only a small observation mission after voicing concern at "narrowed political space" around the vote.

Another U.S.-funded group, Democracy International, had 83 observers deployed across the country. Program Manager Dan Murphy told Reuters observers were reporting that "from a technical standpoint the process is proceeding normally."

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington warned that international players risked lending legitimacy to a "flawed and undemocratic progress."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/ ... ES20140116

[Glyphdoctor]

You are clearly very intelligent and good at analysis. The problem is your analyses usually leave out some key evidence that you don't seem to be aware of or contain some wrong information that in the end renders them unfounded.

Just in this post alone, I can point out several errors-1-you completely forgot the 2012 constitutional referendum and the Shura elections, which had lower turnout, and 2-you suggest that the MB were campaigning for a no vote, when in reality they were campaigning solely for a boycott.

There were several posts you made recently where you claimed that stories was just fabricated because you hadn't seen any other stories about the subject covered, which is clearly because you were thinking the incidents happened the same day and you didn't seen anything about them in the news that day when they had been several weeks prior and the facts that you were disputing I can tell you I saw the evidence for them live on tv here as they happened, not to mention they were widely covered in the press both here and abroad. Just because you aren't aware of something doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Also, your conclusion that the elections were forged based on the numbers alone leaves out an important factor, the lead up to the vote and the media and advertising blitz that people here were exposed to 24 hours a day concerning a yes vote. Without being aware of that and the current circumstances of life in Egypt, you really can't understand why people may have voted yes en masse rather than assume it is forged numbers. Even a lot of people who were against this constitution and what it represents will tell you they have no doubt about the numbers.

[Hafiz]

I did forgot the Shura elections and 2012 constitutional elections where the turnout seems to have been less that 10% and 33%. My point is still the same that turnout for the constitution was not the highest as alleged but now the third lowest . He still exaggerates or, given his position and access to information, lies. To say it was the largest goes to his credibility. There was no intention on my part to mislead.

You are right about the brotherhood not campaigning for a no vote. However it is still true true that moderate Islamists and secularists campaigned for a no vote and therefore it is untrue, as said by the SEC, that no political faction was pushing for a no vote. Again this is something he would have known and, in failing to mention, reduced his credibility as a manager of voting. His credibility was my point and, if he is not credible, what else could be imagined

My points about the media were not just about widespread non-reporting by western wire services which have journalists based in Cairo. It was about the credibility and internal consistency of reports. For example probable time-shifing of several months in the case of a child shot in the head story. This had previously been reported in local media and re-reported several months later. I cannot say that one was identical to the other but there was a high degree of similarity for an unusual incident. I did not say that there was no reporting in the west of killings etc. What I did say was that a number of locally printed stories on this were internally inconsistent and (I should have added) inconsistent with the terror warnings of western countries. It is also more than strange that a number of big local news stories were not covered by the wire services using local media as a source. When the wire services don't reprint local stories there is usually a reason. I didn't say (I think) that stories were fabricated because they were not printed on the same day/week but there is a case for questioning why big stories are delayed. My suspicion is that the 'bad' stories are drip fed but I have no way of knowing.

The media is firmly under the army/new government and it seems fair to assume that most of what they cover is, at best, propaganda and, at worst, fabrication and this includes TV. I assume that their agenda is to frighten the hell out of the voters and to blame the brotherhood for most of it (it must be a bug bear that others are claiming responsibility) for it.I probably take a black and white approach but your knowledge on the ground is obviously more nuanced.

As far as the result is concerned I still say that, as a matter of common sense it is always very difficult to get this result. In Algeria, strong man, weak parties, major repression and internal terror (presidential - long term president) 87%: Sudan full sharia, war with the south, weak parties (presidential - long term president) 67%. North Korea and Cuba in the high 90's so I guess its possible if you take presidential elections as a proxy for a constitutional vote. All of these countries have state media which pumps out the s..t you expect of dictatorships - fear, loathing and lies. and this is similar or worse than Egypt Your anecdotes, whilst relevant, would likely be based on your circle of friends and probably has a Cairo bias. People rarely agree in the 90%'s even when faced with war or oppression or, in the case of Sudan, the risk of reprisals.

The informal vote of about 250,000 seems very low but is in line with previous votes. If Australia had such a low informal vote (c up to 4 times higher than Egypt) it would be a miracle. Maybe Egypt has something to teach the world about democratic elections?

I trust that there are no implications of deliberate falsification. The Shura election I should have checked but the point is the same.
The opposition to the constitution still stands along with doubts about election committees veracity. The vote is a matter of opinion and I have put forward some evidence for doubt based on similar situations. The media bias should surprise no-one and I have given some examples of bias or fabrication. I believe that when, for example, Reuters does not report a big event in Egypt, there is something odd going and that is local biased Media. Readers will know that I have apologized in the past when I was wrong
but that is different to having an opinion based on reasonable evidence..