CAIRO/ALEXANDRIA: Opposition charges of ballot stuffing, bullying and dirty tricks clouded a legislative election in Egypt Sunday in which the ruling party wants to prevent its Islamist rivals from repeating their 2005 success. Some voters were turned away by officials saying there was no election or that polling booths had shut. Others reported ballot boxes filled to the brim only minutes after voting began, rights groups and opposition campaigners said. Egypt's election commission said the vote was fair and complaints were being investigated. It added that official results for the whole country would be announced Tuesday. The banned Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidates are tacitly allowed to run as independents, contested 30 percent of lower house seats after winning an unprecedented 20 percent in 2005. But the Islamists expect a lower total this time. Hundreds of their activists were detained ahead of the poll, signaling the government's determination to squeeze its most vocal critics out of parliament before a presidential vote in 2011. “There's no voting going on, just rigging. It's a disgrace. May those who rig votes be crippled,” said Hassan Sallam as he emerged from a polling booth in the northern city of Alexandria. “There was no privacy. The ballot boxes were full.” The vote's result is in no doubt, only the margin of victory for President Hosni Mubarak's NDP, which has never lost a poll. NDP officials have said they want another two-thirds majority. The two-round election in which 508 seats are at stake, with 10 more appointed by the president, may also offer a foretaste of how the government conducts next year's presidential vote. The High Elections Commission, a body of judges and parliamentary nominees, said voting was smooth. “The complaints we have received were being examined but they are not serious enough to question the vote's legitimacy,” Sameh El-Kashef, poll commission spokesman, said. In Cairo, voting appeared very thin at a dozen polling stations around the capital, where only a handful of people were waiting to cast ballots. The head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, Gamal Eid, said the vote was marred by less violence than in past elections, but that was no guide to its fairness.
