The lesson from Cairo and Palm Beach: Process matters most

Three weeks ago, I came to Egypt to conduct dissertation research on elections under authoritarianism. I expected I would witness wholesale vote fraud, while an uninspiring presidential race back in the United States would conclude uneventfully.

To my chagrin, Egyptians have experienced unexpectedly competitive and clean voting, while Palm Beach County irregularities push Gore and Bush toward the judicial equivalent of Mortal Kombat. Comparing the recent experiences of Egypt and America reveals differences and shared challenges for developing democracy in both countries.

Electoral democracy is not built through victory at the ballot box, but rather by the loser's acceptance of defeat. Here the U.S. experience sets it worlds apart from Egypt. Despite current tensions, it seems almost certain one of the two U.S. candidates will recognize the other as winner before the Jan. 20 inauguration.

In contrast, Egypt remains dominated by the ruling National Democratic Party, which has never held a competitive presidential election and typically takes more than 90 percent of the seats in Parliament through flagrantly rigged races. But this year, in what opposition leaders consider an irreversible step toward pluralism, many prominent NDP leaders suffered defeat in voting that was largely tamper-free.

Ironically, it was the judiciary — the potential battleground for the U.S. race — that cleaned up Egypt's political process. While Americans fear a lengthy legal battle between Gore and Bush, Egyptians embrace the 1990 court case that forced the government to accept judicial supervision in this year's elections. Justice was not swift in Egypt, but it was effective. The largely independent judiciary now oversees both voting and tallying, thus preventing ballot-box stuffing or alleyway vote dumping.

And the simplicity of Egyptian ballots would thrill any Palm Beach protester. Forget butterfly formats and mechanized hole punching. Egyptian voters simply check the box next to their chosen candidate's name and symbol. With one out of two Egyptians still illiterate, the symbol identifies candidates for voters who cannot read. Unfortunately, opposition parties are assigned an eclectic variety of markers — umbrella, boat, lantern, gun, tank — while NDP politicians take the attractive mascots of camel and crescent moon. Old American ballots, showing the Democrats' donkey and the Republicans' elephant beside their candidates, offered a less diverse and probably less misleading visual array for the illiterate voter.

But for those who never enter the polling station, debates over ballot design are moot. Last week, voters in both countries complained of disenfranchisement through external barriers. The NAACP has raised charges that black voters in Michigan, Virginia and Florida faced racial profiling and were disqualified, discouraged from voting or falsely told that there were no more ballots.

Meanwhile, Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood has suffered from government-led "religious profiling." Besides jailing hundreds of Brotherhood members before the election season, police intimidated women voters wearing conservative Muslim dress. In districts that favored Brotherhood candidates, security forces erected barricades and fired live ammunition and tear gas to disperse assembled voters. Violent clashes left five people dead; a brutal reminder of how stable the American system is even during its most climactic moments.

And so the contrasts are stark, from misleading ballots in America to deadly bullets in Egypt. But troubles in both nations also indicate shared challenges for improving democratic practices. Americans and Egyptians must still make an effort to register to vote, while many countries — including England, Denmark and Israel — automatically enfranchise their adult citizens.

Further, if Election Day were a national holiday, Americans and Egyptians would be more likely to go to polling stations and less likely to overcrowd them in the late evening. Effective campaign finance reform, nonexistent in both countries, would help ensure that policy positions, rather than advertising budgets, determined voters' choices. And though both Egypt and the United States scoff at the idea of international election monitors, an exchange of observer delegations would reduce the chances of voter discrimination based on race or religious affiliation.

Finally, in the years before their next national elections, the United States and Egypt must improve their systems to ensure that national voting legitimately reflects the choice of the people. Senator-elect Hillary Clinton has already proposed the abolition of the Electoral College. For their part, Egyptian politicians must consider the sensitive issue of including Muslim Brotherhood candidates who seek the peaceful establishment of an Islamic state.

While the world ponders whether Gore or Bush will take the presidency, America's political standstill and Egypt's baby steps toward pluralism show that democracy depends more upon the processes through which we choose our leaders than the election results themselves. Consequently, resolution of the U.S. election can mark the start of a new stage in improving American democracy. Jason Brownlee is a politics graduate student from Raleigh, N.C. He can be reached at brownlee@princeton.edu.