How voters’ ballots evaporated after the president’s veto
Imbaba surprised anyone following the parliamentary race. Although not the only rerun constituency where the vote count fell significantly, it stood out for its location at the heart of Giza, one of the country’s central political battlegrounds, and for the competitor's profile.
Understanding what happened in Imbaba, with its mixed social makeup, may help decode the preliminary results of reruns in the 19 constituencies from the first phase, whose results were voided. Citing violations, the National Elections Authority/NEA canceled them after the president’s “veto.”
The outcome in these constituencies is closely tied to the second phase, which brought its own surprises beyond the engineered contours of the race.
In the rerun, independents advanced while pro-government parties lost ground. Nation’s Future Party was defeated in several annulled constituencies, as well as in some second-phase constituencies, despite the party’s dynamo secretary-general Ahmed Abdel Gawad's boasting only weeks earlier that the party had not lost a single seat in the first phase.
These results show that the elections have many faces, shaped by street-level calculations, sudden shifts in voting patterns, fragile alliances, and last-minute arrangements that break with the script. All of this has unfolded amid a public withdrawal from the entire process and the evaporation of votes in most constituencies.
Imbaba, before and after
Imbaba delivered electoral drama from the first moment. Minutes into the opening day of the now-canceled round, MP Nashwa Eldeeb announced her withdrawal in a speech on the street, saying the election lacked “integrity and transparency.”
At the time, party and political sources told Al Manassa that there had been coordination behind the scenes between the Conservative Party and Nation’s Future. This later surfaced in a statement by Magdy Hemdan, a senior Conservative figure, who spoke of forming a “liberal alliance” in Imbaba, and later posted during the rerun that “liberalism wins in Imbaba.”
In the canceled round, Conservative Party candidate Ehab Elkhouly appeared in front of polling stations flanked by Nation’s Future campaign materials and surrounded by party supporters wearing vests emblazoned with the Nation’s Future logo. Campaign flyers were also seen in the hands of voters outside the stations, in violation of NEA rules.
The tally from that round showed that the runoff would be contested by four candidates: Nation’s Future’s Walid El-Meligy (28,106), independent Ahmed El-Agouz (25,205), Conservative Party candidate Elkhouly (22,860), and Ahmed Abdel Kader of the Democratic Generation Party (20,310).
After the results were canceled, the landscape shifted. Nation’s Future abandoned its alliance with the Conservative candidate. There was less campaigning at polling station entrances. Vote buying continued, but moved to side streets away from polling sites, often through charities, in violation of the law.
When the general committee announced the rerun results, valid ballots totaled 24,503, only a quarter of the original tally. El-Agouz topped the list—but with nearly half his earlier tally, at 12,715 votes. Eldeeb advanced to the runoff with 9,937, followed by El-Meligy with 9,529, a stark drop from the more than 28,000 he held before cancellation.
Elkhouly, whose pre-cancellation total exceeded 22,000 votes, secured only 1,311 making him the lowest-polling candidate in the constituency, with fewer votes than candidate Said Abdel Wahid, who died at dawn the day after the vote but still received more than 3,000 ballots.
Where did the votes go?
Amr El-Sherif, head of the Conservative Party’s election committee, explained to Al Manassa the heavy defeat suffered by the party’s candidate in Imbaba and the evaporation of his original votes.
“Our candidate received 1,311 votes, a very strange number for us,” he said, “but not surprising when you compare it with results in the other annulled constituencies from the first phase. You see the same pattern repeating elsewhere.”
“There had been an alliance and the vote totals were very close,” El-Sherif acknowledged, referring to the earlier electoral pact between Elkhouly and the Nation’s Future candidate. “But this time there wasn’t. We’re against any alliance with pro-government parties. The alliance that happened was between the candidate and his ground campaign, not between the two parties.”
El-Sherif denied any partisan coordination involving Elkhouly or the party’s other candidate, Islam Kortam, who won in Basateen and Dar El-Salam.
A Nation’s Future source, speaking to Al Manassa, said the party “focused on saving its own candidates, staying away from alliances, because the annulled constituencies were under the spotlight.” He agreed that voter abstention played a decisive role in reshaping results.
The phenomenon of evaporating votes also reached Sanaa Barghash, Nation’s Future’s candidate in Damanhour in Beheira. She had secured her seat overwhelmingly in the first round with more than 74,000 votes. She will now face a runoff after receiving 31,305.
From Beheira in the north to Nagaa Hammadi in the south, the pattern persisted. National Front Party candidate Moataz Mahmoud lost the parliamentary seat he had held for two consecutive terms after receiving 12,750 votes, down from a pre-cancellation total of 65,478.
In the same constituency, Nation’s Future MP Maj. Gen. Khaled Khalafallah, who had won his seat with 78,271 votes in the canceled round, received 28,721 in the rerun and now heads to the runoff.
In Alexandria’s Raml constituency, Nation’s Future candidate Ahmed Abdel Magid secured 51,857 votes before cancellation and 15,457 after. His party colleague Omar Elghonemy gained 50,312 votes earlier but 19,680 after the rerun. Homeland Defenders Party candidate Hazem El-Rayyan dropped from 48,837 to 14,561.
How did they evaporate?
The evaporation of votes does not appear to stem from a single factor. Rather, it reflects a complex overlap of forces—none of which include a sudden shift in voter sentiment over the course of just three weeks.
In the rerun of the canceled round, turnout fell in every constituency. But beyond the votes that vanished, the distribution of those that remained shifted dramatically. Candidates who had lost earlier now topped the race, while those who had previously won by landslides fell back to runoffs or out of contention entirely.
Low participation was not the only striking feature of this final stage. The president’s veto also recalibrated the boundaries of interference and mobilization networks, immediately altering candidate standings and the trajectory of the rerun.
In the first round, alliances formed among pro-government parties, and between independents and party candidates. These alliances mobilized support networks and shaped voting paths. With widespread vote buying in several constituencies, ballots often fell in line with these arrangements—something that did not recur in the new landscape.
Despite continued vote buying, turnout declined, and major parties suffered losses to independents who rose on the strength of social networks more stable and less vulnerable to shifting political currents. According to the Nation’s Future source, this may be the result of “political engineering gone wrong from the start,” adding, “I think the choices were not right in several constituencies. Many of the independents who won were originally Nation’s Future members.”
The rerun shows that the erosion of trust in the electoral process has turned elections into an arena of interests and momentary alliances, disconnected from voters’ real preferences. Restoring that trust and putting politics back at the center of the process is the central challenge in the coming years if this scene is not to repeat itself.