egypt-final-presidential-elections-2012

The Carter Center
Presidential Election in Egypt
!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 11, 2012
Carter Center Announces Delegation to Witness Runoff Election in Egypt
The Carter Center announced today that it will deploy a limited mission to witness parts of the June 16-
17, 2012, runoff election for Egypt's president. The Center will deploy 90 witnesses from 36 countries to
follow polling, counting, and those parts of the tabulation processes to which the Center has access.
Twenty-six of the witnesses are already deployed to assess the short campaign period between the first
and second round of polling.
The Carter Center mission will be led by former Prime Minister of Yemen Abdelkarim Al-Iriyani and
former Foreign Minister of Jordan Marwan Muasher, and will also include Jason Carter, state senator of
Georgia, and David Carroll, director of the Carter Center's Democracy Program.
Carter Center witnesses received accreditation cards from the Presidential Election Commission (PEC)
on May 16, less than a week before the first round of polling, which prevented assessment of critical
pre-election phases including voter registration, candidate nomination, and campaigning . Due to the
late accreditation for the election, as well as other limitations that included restrictions on issuing public
statements, a 30-minute time limitation on witnesses' access to polling stations, and a lack of access to
the aggregation of results at the national level, the Center was only able to deploy a limited mission to
witness the first round of voting on May 23- 24, 2012.
Because of the continued application of these restrictions, the Center's mission for the runoff is
unfortunately also limited. As a result, the Center will not be able to draw conclusions about the overall
electoral process, and its statements therefore will focus solely on those aspects of the process to which
its witnesses have direct access.
A preliminary statement of the Center's findings on the first round, released May 26, reported that while
the polling process was largely peaceful and orderly, it occurred in a broader political context beset by
uncertainty. The statement refrained from providing an overall assessment of the process, and noted
that the PEC's restrictions undermined the overall transparency of the process.
The Carter Center's election mission is conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Principles for
International Election Observation and Code of Conduct that was commemorated at the United Nations
in 2005 and has been endorsed by 40 election observation groups. The Center assesses the electoral
process based on Egypt's national legal framework and its obligations for democratic elections
contained in regional and international agreements.
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