CAIRO — In the second phase of Egypt’s constitutional referendum, lines of men and women stretched along Monofeya’s main downtown boulevard, named after late President Anwar Sadat, where four polling stations opened at 8 a.m. to receive the 22,000 registered voters assigned to that main street alone.
“Mathematically, if each voter takes one minute to cast their ballot, each of the polling stations will require more than 90 hours to cover the number of registered voters,” principle of Al-Qadima Elementary School, who refused to have his name published, told Al-Monitor on Dec. 22, a few minutes before the two polling stations inside his school opened their ballot boxes to hundreds of voters who had already been waiting for almost an hour.
