Friday, April 26, 2019

Egypt’s Constitutional amendments : The referendum results afterwards

On Wednesday, Egypt’s National Elections authority “NEA” declared the final results of the Constitutional amendments referendum.
I guess by now you know that the constitutional amendments passed by 88.83% of the votes whereas 11.17% of the votes were against the amendments.
The official numbers released by the NEA in a press conference says 27,193,593 voters out of 61 million eligible voters participated in the referendum.
Accordingly, The turnout of the referendum is 44.33%.
The valid votes counted 26,362,421 votes “96.94%” while the spoilt votes counted only 831,172 votes “3.06%”.
The “Yes for Constitutional amendments” got 23,416,741 votes “88.83%” while the “No for Constitutional amendments got 2,945,680 votes “11.17%”.



The turnout of the referendum is 44.33 %, which is actually the highest official result of a turnout in a referendum in Egypt since 2011. 
Casting a vote in front of a mobile phone camera
I bet he said Yes !!

It is even higher than the turnout of Egypt’s March 2011 referendum by 0.14%.
March 2011 referendum and its legendary queues had 44.19% turnout.

Of course, there are major differences that must be taken into consideration.
The number of eligible registered voters in Egypt in March 2011 was 45 million voters whereas in April 2019 the number is 61 million voters.

Another major difference in April 2019 is how the National Elections authority allowed the internal migrant employees and workers to vote in any polling station outside their governorate and it was seen how that affected the whole process.
There is another difference people have forgotten, the “No” camp in 2011 had better campaign opportunity despite the short time unlike the “No” Camp in 2019 which did not any real fair chance for campaigning realistically speaking.

The fact that the No camp got “11.17%” according to official numbers is achievement considering that we are speaking about online campaign only for a few weeks despite the security crackdown. 


The Constitutional amendments referendum was held last Friday till Sunday in Egyptian consulates and embassies for Egyptians abroad while it was held from Saturday till Tuesday.

The breakdown of the results in the governorates or Egyptian embassies has not been released yet.
Some unconfirmed reports say that the votes against the amendments were higher in the Egyptian expats’ votes in the West more than in the East or to be specific the gulf.

I won’t be surprised if those reports are true. To be honest, the majority vote of the Egyptian expats in the Gulf have been always whoever in power since 2011.

Anyhow on Tuesday night, the official gazette announced that the constitutional amendments went into effect starting Tuesday hour before the declaration of the NEA, which means the current president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi is extended for 2 years to become six years instead of four.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Zeionabia,

    The articles you post are amazing, I like the reports and the use of data in them.
    I have a small comment regarding the graphs representing the comparison of 2011 to 2019, I would have made vis that represents the percentages of Yes, no and invalid for the 2 referendums and would put the number of eligible voters separately and the turnout also separately.
    Created them here if you wanna have a look
    https://infogram.com/ref19-1hnp270v58rn6gq?live
    Thank you and keep up the great work.

    ReplyDelete
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