Yet the Brotherhood's excellent organizing should enable it to overcome two other major challenges. The first challenge is Egypt's absurdly confusing balloting system. Voters cast one ballot for their preferred party, which elects a slate of party-affiliated candidates that will comprise two-thirds of the next parliament; and another ballot on which they choose two individual candidates - one professional and one worker - who will comprise one-third of the parliament. To complicate matters further, there might be as many as fifty parties on a given party-list ballot, and dozens of names on the individual-candidacy ballot. And for the quarter of Egyptians who are illiterate, there is yet another complication: each candidate and party is assigned a unique graphical symbol, though some are easy to confuse (such as the separate symbols for clock and wristwatch), while others are hard to discern (even Google Translate took a while to figure out that a circular object that in Arabic is called "tirs" means "gear"). The Brotherhood's kiosks, however, enable it to properly advise voters who might otherwise get lost in very process of voting.
The second challenge is the ever-present threat of violence at the polling places. The Brotherhood's omnipresence near the polls enables it to maintain a certain level of security. I got to witness how this might work on Monday in Sayida Zeinab. A few blocks from the polling location, a man suddenly emerged brandishing a large sword, and walked menacingly down the street screaming, "I will stay here. Nobody will move me." Nearby, a young activist appeared prepared to use a long neon lightbulb as a weapon, while a third youth removed his belt, apparently to use it as an improvised whip. (Rest assured that your intrepid reporter, who was already a full block away, bravely ducked into a side street until the commotion ended.) Word soon reached Muslim Brothers inside the polling place, and they emerged to consult with their counterparts who were manning the Freedom and Justice kiosk. The scene settled down, thankfully, without any violence-but had things turned ugly, the Muslim Brotherhood clearly had the manpower to respond.
The Brotherhood ground operation, which calls to mind some of the best American campaigns in both its use of technology and distribution of activists, suggests that the organization, which was only legalized a few months ago, has mastered democratic forms quite quickly. But when probed on the substance of their political platform, the Brotherhood remains firmly illiberal. When I asked Shams el-Din, the Brotherhood neurologist, whether he believed that homosexuals should be stoned, he said, "Yes." "We think that the laws should conform with what has been put forward by the revelation, using parliamentary means."
Shams el-Din similarly expressed his support for instituting Qur'anic hudud punishments, under which thieves are punished by having their hands cut off. Meanwhile, Mansour-the kiosk manager in Manial-expressed his approval when I told him about a young Muslim Brother who once told me of his wish to die as a martyr in Palestine. "It's the same feeling for everyone who loves God and who wishes to die for the sake of God," he said.
There are other, non-theocratic parties and candidates vying in this election, of course. But they simply haven't shown the will, or perhaps the ability, to organize and mobilize voters consistently across the country. Indeed, judging from the first day of voting, it's the Muslim Brotherhood's theocratic political vision, empowered through elections, that seems to be in Egypt's immediate future.
