group 2: voting in elections between Egypt and Denmark

Our main question was about the voting in elections, and how such a thing differs between Egypt and Denmark, we believed that the best way to get to know the real situation was to interact with ordinary people in the streets from various age groups and see how they view the situation, and we got real interesting results.

Firstly, for the important role political parties are supposed to play in elections, as candidates are supposed to reprsent defferent political parties that reflect in turn different interests of the people, we found that no one is a member in any political party, in both Egypt and Denmark, this could be for the weakness of those political parties, or that one political party is highly popular and reflects the interests of most of the people, so they find it useless to join any party.

About the voting ID, which is conducted in Egypt only not Denmark, it appeared that 75.6% of Egyptians do not have a voting ID, and this could be for the complications of issuing a voting ID for some people, and the whole process is not very accurate, also untill recently there have been a deadline for getting the voting ID, and many people did not know about this deadline so they did not get their IDs.

We wanted to know the real percentage of those who vote, and why do or don’’t they vote, the results were that 83% of Egyptians who conducted the survey do not vote, and 17% do vote, those who did vote was for they believe it was their right, or they do vote because it did not cost them anything, and as for those who did not vote 40% of them do not trust the government, and 36% of them did not believe their vote matters. On the other hand in Denmark, the percentage of those who conducted the survey who vote came out to be 86%, a real high one compared to that of Egypt, they vote because they believe it is their right to do so, while the rest who did not vote was because they do not care. In addition to voting, asking people to vote is something we wanted to know about too, so we came up that in Egypt 44% of those who conducted the survey said they do tell others to vote, while 56% said they do not, and as for Denmark, those who conducted the survey do not ask people particularly to vote, but they think it's important to vote.

Another important aspect should be taken into consideration, which is of the importance of the gender and religion of the candidate, in Egypt it appeared that 32% of those who conducted the survey believed the gender and religion of the candidate mattered, and 68% did not matter for them, also for those who said yes, 60% were concerned more with the religion rather than the gender, and 40% were concerned with the gender rather than the religion. In Denmark, 86% are not concerned with the gender or religion of the candidate, while the other 14% were concerned just for the fear of not having neutrality.

And as for being awre of the program of the candidate, in Egypt 48.3% said they were not aware of the programs of candidates, and 51.6% were aware of them, while in Denmark, 67.6% of those who conducted the survey are aware of candidates’ programs, 9.6% are not aware of them, and 13.3% knew a little about them. Of course the role of the media is highly important to be discussed at this point, concerning this, in Egypt 50.3% believed the media played no role in helping to know about the candidates and their programs, and 49.7% believed the media has a great role in doing so, while in Denmark, 26.6% believed the media had an influence in this field whether positive or negative, and the rest were divided, some did not know much about that influence of the media, and others did not believe it has an influence in the first place. Concerning the role og NGOs in the election and voting process, it appeared it is not really relevant in Denmark, while in Egypt 58.7% believed NGOs do not play an important role in spreading awarness among people about elections and candidates, and about 30% believed they do. In any country were channels are weak between government/political parties and the people, there is always a shift to the media and NGOs to fill in this empty role, but as the survey shows, in such a situation both the media and NGOs do not play this role too.

Voting sometimes is biased for the reasons people choose a certain candidate for, it is not always about their efficiency or programs, that is why we asked about this too, and we found out that in Egypt 11% voted for a certain candidate because they know him/her personally, whether a relative, a friend, or someone told them to vote for him/her, 62% voted for a certain candidate because they believe in his/her efficiency, and 27% voted for a certain candidate because it does not make a difference for them, they are all alike. While in Denmark it came up that 63.6% choose a certain candidate because of his/her program, and the rest because they believe they are alike.

Concerning Egypt only, there is a problem that people go voting just to get money that some candidates use to buy their votes, so the survey showed that 88.6% believed that people do go voting to get money, and 11.4% believed they did not, those 88.6% believed that it is a problem of poverty that the government should work on fixing to avoid biasness of the elections, others beleieved there should be like an agent to monitor elections also to avoid such abuses, and others believed it couldnot be solved.

The last thing we asked about was whether people voted or not in the last electins, in Denmark, 88% said yes they voted last elections, while in Egypt it was nearly the opposite, 88.4% of those who conducted the survey did not vote last elections, and 11.6% did vote.
Such a survey helped us a lot to reveal to you the differences between Egypt and Denmark concerning the voting issue,specially that Egypt is close to have parliamentary elections and presidential ones afterwards, such problems that appear from the survey should be taken into consideration and set to be solved quickly, we do not want to witness another elections that do not reflect what do people really want due to procedural problems, transparency problems, and problems of trust as well. In Denmark too, we can notice from the survey that the situation is better than Egypt, but also it showed some deficiencies that needed to be considered, next step would be to set some certain mechanisms to solve those problems, both in Egypt and Denmark.