Summary
This week's presidential election in Egypt is not about who wins – that was settled long ago – but about how many people bother to cast ballots.Authorities hope that enough people will vote for President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi to lend legitimacy to an election in which the only other candidate is an obscure politician who has made no effort to challenge him.
A number of other presidential hopefuls stepped forward earlier this year, including some who might have attracted a sizable protest vote.
Sisi won nearly 97 percent of the vote when he was first elected in 2014, but less than half of eligible Egyptians voted even though the election was extended to three days from two.
The military also said Sunday it would monitor local and foreign media coverage of the vote from a specially created media center that would operate 24 hours a day.
In a one-hour TV interview that seemed more like an infomercial, Sisi said he wished he had 1 or 2 trillion dollars of his own money that he could spend on modernizing the country.
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