CAIRO: A total of 18,472 votes in Damanhur went to a jailed parliamentary candidate after his candidacy was approved by the Administrative Justice Court of Alexandria, MENA reported.
When the court approved his request to run for the parliament, Mabrouk Zeatar was jailed pending a retrial, and he applied to the High Elections Commission (HEC) to while in jail. On Sept. 30, he was sentenced to five years in prison for inciting murder and possessing a firearm in the retrial.
Zeatar belonged to former Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party and was a parliamentarian under Mubarak’s rule.
After his final conviction, the votes he garnered would be void.
Another quirk of the parliamentary elections was in Minya, Upper Egypt, where a candidate who died two weeks before the survey yielded 386 votes in a polling station.
Officials from the High Elections Committee (HEC) said that late Mahmoud Khalafallah obtained the votes although there was a sign placed at the polling station saying that he had passed away, Youm7 reported.
Another candidate, who was disqualified one day before the elections, obtained the majority of votes at a polling station in Egypt’s Mediterranean city of Alexandria.
Ali Elba, who was disqualified from the parliamentary race by a court ruling over his “bad reputation”, got over 60 percent of votes in a polling station in his hometown al-Raml of Alexandria’s.
The confusion was caused mainly because the ballots were already printed out before the court ruling and the death of the Minya candidate.