early voting results

This was taken from Ahram Online:

“3:18 A top judicial source tells Al-Ahram’s Arabic-language news website that 1,750 out of more than 13,000 polling stations have returned the following results:

Mursi 1,000,000+
Shafiq 740,000
Abul-Fotouh 690,000
Sabbahi 545,000
Mousa 480,000”

That’s not even 15% of the vote in so far. But if this holds up, then it’s been a dismal performance from Amr Moussa, who at several points in the past month looked like the possible frontrunner.

What happened? The conventional wisdom is that Moussa voters shifted to Shafik as a more hardline anti-Islamist figure. Moussa may also have suffered from his (well-deserved, in my opinion) reputation as a shifty opportunist.

If it had ended up as Aboul Fotouh vs. Moussa, as expected until recently, it would have been roughly Islamist Lite versus Mubarak Lite. But if those two are replaced in the runoff by Mursi and Shafik, then we’re moving a couple of steps away from the “Lite” in both cases, and are headed for a far more polarizing runoff next month than had seemed to be the case.

But again, we’re still seeing less than 15% of the vote having been counted so far.

Sabbahi is the basically Nasserist anti-Mubarak activist, and arguably the most anti-Western candidate among the top five.