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Last night in Cairo, voters were tense ahead of the first round of Egypt’s long-awaited parliamentary elections. Hundreds of protesters huddled in the rain between Cairo’s Parliament and Cabinet building, part of a three-day-old gathering that could be considered the radical little sister of the ongoing demonstration in Tahrir Square.
Basem Fathy, an activist monitoring the elections for an NGO, was stuck in an office all morning filtering crowd-sourcing feeds. The setbacks he described were not the diabolical kind: “The main problems are late openings of polling stations,” he said, and ballots without official government stamps. Leslie Campbell, the Middle East regional director of the National Democratic Institute, was in Cairo with a large contingent to observe the elections. He also ticked off nuisances like late openings and ballots being late to arrive, but he said these problems seem to stem not from malfeasance but from bad preparation. “When you combine that with the level of excitement, there are going to be some long lines, he said. “The election has clearly captured people’s attention.”
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