How Egypt Voted

Map at the Morsi Campaign's Link is Interactive

Whether or not Muhammad Morsi ultimately is sworn in as Egypt's first elected civilian President, it's clear this was a very close election; by Ahram Online's provisional count, Morsi has 51.8% to Shafiq's 48.10%; Governorate-by-Governorate breakdowns are here. Out of some 25 million votes cast, the two candidates are separated by under a million votes. (And a warning: all these numbers are from party poll counters, not the official count; official results won't be announced until Thursday.)

The Ahram Online results can be usefully supplemented by a map put out by the Morsi campaign (above); the original, unlike the static image above, is interactive and the results of each governorate is show if you hover your cursor over it. I wonder if the Muslim Brotherhood are used to the US political "Red State/Blue State" convention, since they've made themselves Red, which would make them the Republicans.

What's clear from either means of approaching the returns is that Shafiq's strength was (as in round one) the Delta (Mubarak home country, strong old NDP party apparatus) plus a strong showing in Cairo (secularists and Copts?), where Hamdeen Sabahi ran strong last time. He also carried thinly populated South Sinai and Red Sea, both areas with heavy tourism. (The booze and bikinis vote?) The Brotherhood carried almost everything else, including Alexandria and Giza governorates, both urban. But both sides ran well in many governorates, and the overall result was a close one.