Commencing on November 28th, Egyptian elections are set to be a drawn out and extremely complicated process, lasting over three months, with every voter having to visit a polling station between 2 and 4 times.
They will kick off with three rounds of elections for the People’s Assembly (PA) between November and January, followed by another three rounds for the Shura Council (SC) from January until March. Several governorates will be involved in each round, with roughly a third of the population voting at once.
The PA will consist of 498 members, 10 of whom will be appointed by SCAF (in the absence of a president) and the remainder elected. Of the SC’s 270 seats, 90 will be appointed.
In both houses members will be elected by a mixed system consisting of Individual Candidate (IC) districts and Proportional Representation (PR) party list districts. Two thirds of the elected proportion of both houses will be by PR, and one third IC.
The district boundaries will differ depending on which house the vote is for, and which of the parallel voting systems the ballot paper concerns.
During the PA election rounds, the IC vote will be divided into 83 districts, each selecting two representatives, while the PR vote will be divided into 46 districts selecting between 4 and 12 representatives each, depending on population size. For the SC both the PR and the IC elections will be divided into 30 districts, fielding 4 and 2 candidates each respectively.
Confused yet? To add a further complication, if the first round of IC elections for either house fails to yield two representatives with a simple majority of the vote, at least one of whom is a farmer or worker (very likely), voters will have to attend a run-off vote a week later.
This is due to the retainment of a provision requiring that at least half of those elected to either house, by either method, must be farmers or workers (as opposed to professionals).
Add to this the complex mathematical equation and quota system which are to be used to allocate seats from party lists, and you have an almost incomprehensible voting system.
The system has other drawbacks. For example, in the PR vote the mathematical equation which will be used to determine from which party the worker/farmer quota must be filled will select parties with less votes, likely to be the smaller parties. Those members representing them in the legislature may therefore be unrepresentative of their leadership.
The quota system will also favour parties and groups with concentrated local support over parties with geographically disparate backing, leading to the likely under-representation of smaller parties.
Despite an apparent tendency towards affirmative action, nothing has been done to guarantee women or religious minorities representation in the legislature. While a law has been passed stating that women must be represented on every party list, there is no obligation that they be placed in winnable positions. Due to the small size of many districts and the way seats are to be allocated, unless they are placed first or second, they are extremely unlikely to convert their presence on the list into an actual seat, meanwhile parties are under no obligation to place representatives of religious minorities on their lists at all.
However, all voting systems have limitations, and many of these problems are outweighed by the immediate concern of having confused and uncertain voters come election time.
The drawbacks of such a labyrinthine system include obvious difficulties, such as confusion over when to vote, which ballot slip refers to which method of election, and voter fatigue caused by the numerous times they have to visit a polling station.
A more long-term potential issue is that misunderstandings regarding the method of converting votes into seats will lead to a lack of trust in the result, and suspicions about outcome manipulation.
The complicated electoral system could therefore lead to not only lots of spoiled ballots, but demands for a second election. Distortions are bound to appear, and are inherent in the system, as they are in most electoral systems, and if the process is not fully explained to the electorate, they are unlikely to consider the subsequently-formed government legitimate.
Time is running out for this process of education to take place and the government must not only take pains to ensure people are aware of when and how they should be voting, but that they comprehend the system as a whole.
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