Bahraini parliamentary elections were conducted despite a massive boycott prompting the ruling regime to falsify voting rates.
The Minister of Justice and Chairman of the Supreme Committee for Parliamentary Elections, Nawaf Al-Maawda, claimed that the participation rate in Bahrain’s elections reached 73%, the highest since 2002.
Al-Maawda claimed during a press conference that no violations affecting the integrity of the electoral process were recorded, and he valued the awareness and attendance of the Bahraini voter to exercise his constitutional right to elections.
On the other hand, activists circulated a video clip of a judge supervising the supervisory committee in the first district in the capital governorate. She was surprised by the results announcement in official local newspapers during the vote-counting process in the centre under her supervision.
The judge was astonished to hear the news of announcing results without her knowledge.
Candidates said that the Khulaifi regime authorities tampered with the vote-counting process in many constituencies, especially the third constituency in the Northern Governorate, which lasted for marathon hours.
Observers wondered how the Khulaifi regime reached this record percentage of popular participation in the elections and how this percentage increased from the participation rate in the 2006 parliamentary elections.
The modesty of the votes obtained by the candidates in most constituencies reveals the government’s extent of fraud to face the frustration it is experiencing from the time of the reluctance to participate in the sham elections.
To clarify the picture, we can refer to the sixth Muharraq, for example, which was won by Al-Wefaq MP Sheikh Hamza Al-Diri in 2006, where he won 4,507 votes out of 4,992 votes, with a percentage of more than 90% of the total votes.
In the elections that took place yesterday, candidate Hisham Al-Ashery won only 1,390 votes, and all the contestants in the constituency received 2,237 votes, which means that all the contestants did not get half of Al-Diri’s votes.
If we assume that the electoral bloc in Muharraq Six has remained the same since 2006 until today, then the percentage of boycotts in this district alone amounted to more than 50%.
But if we assume that the electoral bloc increased by a thousand electoral votes, the participation rate in it did not exceed 38%, and accordingly, the other districts can be measured.
Even with the removal of a large mass of voters, amounting to more than 94,000 citizens, from the voter rolls, the participation rate will not reach 73% because this contradicts the numbers announced by Minister Al-Muawda himself because they are irrational numbers.
Minister Al-Moawda announced that 251,641 voters had participated in 55 polling stations within 12 voting hours. How was this large number received during this time only?
If we divide the number of participants equally by each polling station, each polling centre received more than 4,500 voters in just 720 minutes, i.e. an average of 2.11 voters every minute. This number does not seem exaggerated, but voter registration is overstated.
To clarify, each voter needs to register his data before obtaining an electoral card and then go to cast his vote. And if we know that each centre contains 3 data entrants, each employee receives and records the data of more than two voters per minute, which is impossible.
We are facing an imaginary number by all standards. Neither the number of votes obtained by candidates in opposition constituencies, in particular, permits the announcement of this percentage nor the process of registering voter data while ignoring the prior manipulation of voter lists.
The government wanted to address the extent of frustration, so it went so far as to announce a record turnout that did not happen even with the participation of opposition leaders in the 2006 elections, such as the Al-Wefaq Society, which obtained 63% of the votes, in addition to the number of votes won by Waad Association candidates and other opposition forces!
