Life's Little Victories: Election monitors

An Egyptian court has ruled against the government and allowed local NGO monitoring of the elections. The Egyptian judiciary has authorised local non-governmental organisations to monitor the historic 7 September poll, a decision hailed as a major step towards ensuring a more transparent election. [...] Overruling the electoral commission's earlier decision to ban independent NGOs, an administrative court argued that "the monitoring process was not part of the commission's prerogatives", judiciary sources said. Judge Faruq Abdel Kader said the presence of independent Egyptian civil society groups was necessary to ensure "the transparency of the vote". A coalition of independent NGOs had filed the case with a Cairo administrative court demanding the electoral commission go back on its decision to restrict supervision duties to the country's judges. Decisions by the electoral commission cannot be overruled, but the judiciary circumvented the problem by ruling that the issue of monitoring was outside the commission's competence. Alright Egypt's judges! This of course, will cause the Egyptian government to create more and more polling stations (9000 now and counting) in order to be able to forge the elections easier. This is becoming very complicated for them; they never had to work so hard at cheating before. I blame Bush personally!