Egyptian court probes voter database forgery

An Egyptian court has heard a case case alleging that 14 million names were fraudulently added to the country's voters' database.
The court proceedings were conducted yesterday.
Ibrahim Kamel, a former Member of Parliament, has alleged that 14 million names had been added to the database of Egyptian voters, the Daily News Egypt reported.
Kamel appeared on a TV talk show where he claimed that someone accessed the original voter database at the Ministry of Interior and added names to the list before returning it to the ministry.
Kamel said that, according to July 2011 statistics from the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics, only 37 million Egyptians are eligible to vote.

But, the Supreme Electoral Committee says 51 million Egyptians are eligible to vote, giving a 14 million difference, he said.

He said that the additional voters were participating in both parliamentary and presidential elections.
Hamdy Al-Fakharny, a lawyer working on the case, said that his name was repeated hundreds of times in the voting database.
He said that documents demonstrating the repetition of some names were given to the court.
He added that the voting irregularities nullified the election results.
Constitutional expert Mohamed Noor Farahat said that if the court finds that there are additional names in the database, then the elections and referendums in which forged votes were involved would be invalid.