No Need to Start Over

Samer S. Shehata is an assistant professor of Arab politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of "Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt."

Updated October 6, 2011, 10:58 PM

What kind of electoral system should Egypt adopt? It should be left up to Egyptians to decide. I make this obvious point only because one already hears numerous electoral system experts declare definitively — sometimes with little knowledge of Egypt -- what kind of electoral system Egyptians should embrace.

Clean up voter rolls and install election monitors, but don't adopt a totally new electoral system -- yet.

Some will encourage Egyptians to move to a system based on proportional representation. There are certainly advantages to such systems. However, given the extremely short six-month time-frame the military authorities have prescribed for elections (and constitutional amendments) to take place, I believe the particular type of system adopted for the next parliamentary elections is not the most important issue.

For the short term at least, it makes most sense for the country to maintain as much of the existing system as possible (e.g., individual candidacy, two member districts, with the same district boundaries and the same total number of parliamentary seats, etc.) while eliminating the egregious practices that characterized elections in the Mubarak era. Too much change could cause tremendous confusion.

Rather than creating a thoroughly new system, the focus in the short term should be on ensuring that elections are executed in a clean, transparent, and fair manner.

What would this take?

First, Egypt needs a truly independent Electoral Commission that is in charge of the entire electoral process, including voter registration, candidacy issues, logistics, vote counting, and the announcement of results. This commission must be neutral and above and beyond the military authorities and any other government body. This means that the Interior Ministry, which previously played a major role in administering elections (and engineering electoral outcomes!), must be removed from the process.

Second, Egypt’s highly respected judges must be given back the authority to supervise the voting process on election day. The Constitutional Court’s decision in 2000 to interpret “judicial supervision of elections” to mean “one judge for every ballot box” was a historic advance in moving Egypt significantly closer to free and fair elections.

This is one of the major reasons why the 2000 and the 2005 legislative elections were relatively less fraudulent than prior elections (the government amended Article 88 of the constitution in 2007 to eliminate this safeguard). “One judge for every ballot box” makes electoral fraud significantly harder. Judicial supervision needs to be restored. In fact, this is the second of seven demands made by Egypt’s National Association for Change, led by Mohamed ElBaradei.

Third, elections must be monitored by both domestic and international civil society groups. This is absolutely crucial if elections are to have credibility for Egyptians and the international community. And it is something the Mubarak regime adamantly refused.

Fourth, once and for all, the outdated and hopelessly flawed voter registration lists need to be scrapped as the method of determining voter eligibility. These notoriously bad lists — as in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas — routinely included the names of the dead, in addition to bogus names and non-residents in each district. Unsurprisingly, dead people regularly voted in Egyptian elections. In the place of the voter registration lists, voting should take place on the basis of government issued national identification cards (what Egyptians call the “national number”) and not the mistake- ridden, voter rolls. This is also among the demands put forward by the National Association for Change.

Fifth, the present system allows a person to live in Alexandria and run for parliament in Aswan. You can live in a luxury Cairo penthouse and “represent” a poor rural district in the Delta. This needs to stop and candidates should only be allowed to stand in elections in districts in which they reside. Such a measure would likely make Egypt’s ostensibly representative institutions more truly representative.

There will certainly be other issues that have to be addressed in the future. For example, a left-over of the Nasserist socialist era mandates that one of the two seats in each district be held by a “worker or farmer.” There has been much debate in Egypt about whether this system is now anachronistic.

Similarly, the old Mubarak regime recently instituted a “quota” of 64 additional seats in the lower house of parliament exclusively for women. However, rather than being a genuinely progressive move, this was a bogus attempt by the regime to appear progressive for Western audiences. In fact, the ruling party hardly nominated any female candidates in the 2005 elections! The same, unfortunately, is true of most of the opposition parties. Whether these measures need to be changed or eliminated in the future might be better left for the future.