CAIRO, May 27, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Egypt's opposition cast serious doubts on the official results of a referendum on multi-candidate presidential elections in the Arab country, as the Bush administration condemned police attacks on pro-reform demonstrators.

Some 53.6 percent of registered voters cast their ballot in the referendum and eighty-three percent of them voted in favor, Egyptian Interior Minister Habib Al-Adly announced Thursday, May 28.

"This rate of attendance is just impossibly high ... It seems the number has been multiplied by five," Gameela Ismail, spokeswoman for the opposition Ghad (Tomorrow) Party was quoted as saying by Reuters.

All Egyptian opposition parties in addition to the outlawed but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood had asked Egyptians to boycott the vote.

"I don't believe this number is possible," agreed Mohamed Habib, deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"We know not more than 5 or 10 percent of people go to vote ... I have many doubts about this number."

The pro-reform Kefaya (Enough) movement also questioned the official vote results.

"The turnout was very poor, ranging between 20-25 percent of the registered voters," George Isac, the movement coordinator, told Aljazeera news channel.

The new election system, replacing referendums on a single presidential candidate chosen by a parliament dominated by the ruling National Democratic Party, takes effect in elections in September.

The opposition maintains that the conditions on presidential candidates are so restrictive that the NDP would not face a credible challenge.

Under the proposed changes, independent candidates for September's election must collect 250 signatures from members of national and provincial assemblies that are dominated by the NDP.

For the following election in 2011, the rules will also require parties fielding candidates to hold a minimum of five percent of seats in both houses of parliament.

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, 77, who has run the Arab world's most populous nation since 1981, is expected to seek a fifth six-year term but has not yet said whether he will stand.

Reuters correspondents, who visited polling stations during the voting on Wednesday, May 26, saw no queues in the polling stations and only a trickle of voters.

But in many places government agencies and state-owned companies bussed their employees to polling stations to vote, according to Reuters.

The newspaper of the opposition Al-Wafd Party said some of its reporters joined a group of ruling party supporters and managed to vote at eight separate polling stations.

The officials did not check their names against the registers, the newspaper said.

Other Egyptians said they could not vote because their names were not on the lists.

Bush said beating people for opposing the government "is not our view of how a democracy ought to work".

US President George W. Bush on Thursday condemned Egyptian police attacks on demonstrators during the referendum, reported Agence France Presse (AFP).

Egyptian police used clubs to break up a group of opposition demonstrators in Cairo and cracked down on other rallies across the country.

"The idea of people expressing themselves and opposition of the government and getting a beating is not our view of how a democracy ought to work," Bush said in a joint press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House.

"It's not the way that you have a free election," he said.

"People ought to be allowed to express themselves and I'm hopeful that the president will have open elections, that everybody can have trust in," Bush said.

Kefaya said several of its activists had been beaten up and molested by police and Mubarak supporters at Wednesday's anti-referendum rallies.

"Members of the National Democratic Party ... broke our bones, shed our blood and sexually harassed our female colleagues," it said in a statement.

"They unleashed thugs, pickpockets and criminals that were waving posters of the president in one hand and sticks, knifes and stones in the other," it added.