It seems that the Egyptian authorities intend to punish the citizens who failed to vote in the last presidential elections by referring them to the Public Prosecution to apply a legal article stipulating that any person who fails to vote will be fined LE550.
But it is interesting to note that the number of these boycotters is not hundreds or thousands. It is close to 35 million people, namely 34 million and 823 thousand and 986 voters, according to Egyptian media.
The Egyptian media quoted the head of the National Elections Committee, Lashin Ibrahim, as saying that the commission is close to completing the names of those who boycotted the elections. The committee is committed to enforcing the law, and this fine is not an innovation.
Article 43 of the presidential election law of 2014 stipulates that "a fine of not more than 500 pounds is paid to a person whose name is restricted to the voters' database and who has no excuse to vote in the presidential elections."
Although similar legal materials have existed before, they have never been activated in any previous electoral entitlements, mainly due to practical considerations regarding the difficulty of prosecutors calling up tens of millions of people.
| Several attempts have been made to urge Egyptians to participate in the recent elections (Reuters - Archive) |
Egyptians have often viewed the news of fines being imposed on voters as a kind of threat-induced inducement to push voters to vote for democratic form by talking about good participation.
Over the past decades, the boycott has been the most prominent feature of the Egyptian elections, with the exception of those that followed the January 11, 2011 revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to parliamentary elections that were widely attended and followed by presidential elections. 13 candidates, and ended with the victory of Mohamed Morsi.
But Morsi barely completed a year in power and was sacked in July 2013 following a military intervention led by his then defense minister, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, who later took office in elections in 2014 and won a second term earlier this year.
In both elections, turnout was so modest that the authorities extended the vote in the 2014 elections to a third day, while the last elections in March saw media campaigns stressing the need for participation and threatening the players with a fine.
Although the National Commission talked about the participation of about 24 million voters in the recent elections by 41% of the registered voters, in return for the absence of nearly 35 million, the rights organizations and opposition entities confirmed that the number of participants in the elections was much lower.