Egyptian Voters Impeded In Opposition Strongholds

A woman stands in front of policemen blocking the entrance to a polling station in Giza, Egypt. Residents in opposition areas complained of authorities turning them away during elections for parliament's upper house. (Associated Press)

AWSEEM, Egypt -- Egyptian security forces barred voters from entering polling centers in opposition areas Monday during the first national elections since the U.S.-backed government of President Hosni Mubarak pushed through constitutional changes that analysts say were intended to keep the Muslim Brotherhood from power.

In Awseem, a dusty town north of Cairo that is a Brotherhood stronghold, security officers lined up behind chest-high plastic riot shields to block all entrances to a locked polling place. Officers clenching automatic rifles alongside a row of police wagons effectively sealed off another voting site.

Residents in other towns around Egypt on Monday complained of police turning them from the polls and occasionally beating them. One person was killed in election-related violence, the Associated Press reported.

In areas loyal to Mubarak's National Democratic Party, voters surged into polling sites. In Bortos, also north of Cairo, a girl of 15 said she cast a ballot for the NDP, and children who appeared much younger than the voting age of 18 waved fingers stained with the pink ink used to mark ballots and boasted that they had voted.

"See him?" a young man shouted from the window of a bus as he and others rode away from the polling site. He reached out to slap a poster, taped to the bus, of the governing party's candidate in Bortos. "This NDP guy is going to win, either way!" the man shouted.

A national referendum in March approved constitutional amendments, championed by Mubarak, that gave limited legislative authority to parliament's upper house, which was previously an advisory body. Other changes enshrined legal prohibitions against religiously based political parties, removed requirements that judges supervise voting in elections, made it easier for the president to dissolve parliament and allowed the suspension of constitutional civil liberties in cases the government deems involve terrorism.

Human rights groups said those changes and Monday's shutdown of opposition polling sites were aimed at the Brotherhood, a politically active Islamic group officially banned in Egypt since 1954. In 2005 parliamentary elections, Brotherhood candidates running as independents became the single largest opposition bloc.

Monday's vote, a first round of balloting for 88 of the upper house's 264 seats, served as the first test of the new measures. Nineteen Brotherhood candidates made Monday's ballot; nearly as many were disqualified through the constitutional changes and other means.

"Together with the constitutional amendments that outlawed any kind of political activity informed by religion, it really looks like the government is determined to shut them out of the political process entirely," Elijah Zarwan of Human Rights Watch said of the Brotherhood.

The presence of security cordons outside the polling places in Awseem, an hour's drive from Cairo, discouraged thousands of residents from voting, said Abdul Basses Himida of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.

Some polling officials simply instructed voters to go away, residents said.

"They told me, 'Oh, there's no election today. Try tomorrow,' " said Adel Achmed Khamil, who went to polling places here throughout the day to try to cast a vote for a candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood.