Sisi poised to sweep president poll in Egypt

CAIRO (AA): Early indications suggest that incumbent President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will win — overwhelmingly — a second term in office, Egyptian state media reported on Thursday, one day after a three-day presidential election.

Egyptian flagship daily Al-Ahram reported that al-Sisi had clinched almost 92 percent of the vote.

His competitor, Musa Mustafa Musa, the leader of a little-known liberal party, meanwhile, won only 3 percent, the newspaper reported.

Roughly 25 million people — out of 59 million eligible voters — cast ballots during the three-day vote, which amounts to a turnout rate of 42 percent, according to Al-Ahram.

Egypt’s official electoral commission will officially announce final poll results Monday.

Online critics, however, challenge Al-Ahram’s figures, saying they have been vastly inflated. They also accuse the Egyptian authorities of forcing civil servants to vote and bribing poor people to cast ballots. On Wednesday, the electoral commission vowed to impose financial penalties on citizens who neglected to vote.

Ballot-counting kicked off Wednesday evening on the third and final day of the poll — Egypt’s third presidential election since its 2011 popular uprising.

The poll was held amid tight security as the Egyptian army continues to fight a deadly militant insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula.

Al-Sisi was widely predicted to win in a landslide after several would-be challengers — including a popular former army chief — were effectively sidelined in the run-up to the election.

A former defense minister, al-Sisi spearheaded a 2013 military coup that unseated Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood group.