The 2010 Elections
These videos are self-explanatory: poll workers flagrantly filling out ballots caught on cell phone by fellow workers and shared anonymously through YouTube.
The elections of 2005, although riddled with accusations of government interference and the closure of voting stations in some governorates, were the closest thing to free and fair election Egyptians had yet experienced.. Opposition “independents” — actually Muslim Brotherhood leaders running as independents because their political party is banned — received 88 seats.
In 2010 by contrast, the elections were an almost perfect storm of corruption. The government rejected election monitoring by international observers, local NGOs and the Egyptian judiciary, and engaged in blatant ballot stuffing, dropping the Muslim Brotherhood from 88 seats to one and leading to an almost universal boycott of the run-off election.
As with the case of Khaled Said, the difference was that the electoral abuses were filmed, and widely distributed across social media. The contrast between apparently raw evidence of electoral corruption and the regime’s contemptuous dismissal of outcries of fraud as sour grapes on the part of losers, led many Egyptians to abandon all hope that the regime would ever reform itself.
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