Egypt's elections - the camel rides out

It is one day to go before the Egyptian elections. The conditions are challenging. The country is under a decades old state of emergency. The armed forces are in power. There are deep political divisions, religious and ideological. Around forty per cent of the population are illiterate and the electoral system is possible the most complicated in the world.

There is an old saying, that a camel is a horse designed by committee. Egypt's election system has been designed by several committees over many years each of which has felt obliged to retain decisions of the previous. When Nasser, who led Egypt's previous revolution of 1952, came to power in 1956, he thanked his supporters from the working classes and the rural poor by reserving fifty per cent of parliamentary representation for workers and farmers. That arrangement still holds. It is overlaid by a hybrid system with one part by proportional representation based on party lists and the other by majority vote for individual candidates.

The elections are to be held in several stages beginning with those for the People's Assembly, or lower house of Parliament. They take place across 27 governorates. The armed forces who rule the country decided the independence of the elections should be overseen by a judge at each polling station. But there are not enough trained judges to go around, so the elections will take place in three parts starting with eight governorates including Cairo, the capital, and the northern region of Damietta, where I will be stationed to witness what takes place.

On Friday, three days before the election, the military rulers decided to extend the voting over two days to give time for everyone to vote. This has given a headache to the judges who have to ensure the ballot boxes are secure overnight before voting continues on the second day. Some judges are planning to sleep with their ballot boxes. In many constituencies the first round of voting will not deliver a majority for any one of the individual candidates so the top two, or in some cases the top four, will proceed to a run off, to be held one week later.

After that the voting begins in the second set of governorates so the final results for the People's Assembly should be known some time in mid January. Once the vote is complete for the lower house, the whole caravan sets off again for the Shura Council, or upper house.

The camel, of course, is an animal particularly well suited for transportation across the desert but it remains to be seen whether Egypt's election system will deliver a democratic future.