Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Road to Civil State : Not everything is bad

Despite many people and parties do not like the recent elections law issued by SCAF and there is a lot of fear regarding the elections yet there is always hope.

Today the ministry of administrative development had a meeting regarding the elections API , oh yes API. That meeting was attended by by tweep Amr Abdel Aziz who shared its details with us on twitter ,  I am just summarizing and translating what he said here.

The government will allow software developing companies to use elections API “Provided by the high commission of elections” in order to develop application.

Through the Elections applications you will know the following :

  • You will be know if you are registered or not.
  • You will know where your voting station is.
  • You will know which ballot box and the number of your name in the list before going and searching for hours “I tried it in time of Mubarak and know how it means to search for hours to find your name”
  •  You will know the details of the candidates whether in the lists or Single vote and whether they they win or not.
  • The service providers are not allowed to promote to present any kind advertisement of any kind or anything that could spoil the neutrality of the elections otherwise the service will be cut immediately.

Interesting Elections 2011/2012 facts :

  • The number of voters increased to 50 million voters after the use of the National ID number.
  • You will vote in the voting station written based on the address in your National ID number.
  • Allegedly the elections will be on three stages to help judges in supervision better.

Well I believe this is a great move regardless of what you think.

There is still an important thing : The Egyptian abroad vote. I know that some of our embassies abroad started to call for Egyptians to get National ID numbers cards and I know that it seems that they will not be to join us in the parliamentary elections but what about the presidential elections and constitution referendum.

Another thing with my all due respect to our Egyptian pride but why we can’t learn from the Indian elections system and start use electronic voting machines , we can buy them from India in fact. I want to minimize the electoral fraud

The number of voters in India are more than Egypt , in fact more than the States and EU combined “The real biggest democracy in the world” and already logically the elections are done on phases just like us now. Of course when I think about it the the elections we should not have this long timeline for elections like them for God sake. We can have both people’s assembly as well as Shura council’s elections in less time that proposed.

2 comments:

  1. this is a great approach for open government/ open data strategies. It's a shame that very few people were aware of it and of how to use the API.
    Kudos to the Moslem Brothers (although I'm not a supporter).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Agreed. This is a good move for goverment. I hope that wil bring a real success.

    ReplyDelete

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