Vote counting in Egypt's landmark presidential election has started after the two final days of polling that will decide the country's next president. The contest is between the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsy and former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq. Voting has taken place in 13,101 polling stations across the country under full judicial supervision. There are about 50 million eligible voters. Early indicators suggest that turnout across the country was lower than during the first round, which took place at the end of May.
7:00 am: Similar to the first round of the presidential election, Morsy finished first in many Upper Egyptian governorates. In Assiut, he secured 554,599 votes, while Shafiq got 346,892. A 43 percent voter turnout is reported by Al-Masry Al-Youm.
The Brotherhood candidate came first in Sohag, which witnessed a 39 percent voter turnout. While he got 531,364 votes, Shafiq got only 381,165.
Morsy also led in Giza, with 1,351,846 votes against 911,884 votes gathered by Shafiq, amounting to a meager difference of 439,962 votes. Morsy also came first in Giza in the first round of elections, sweeping most of the votes in the governorate that makes up 8.4 percent of Egypt's electorate.
Back in the Delta, Morsy achieved some success in both Kafr al-Sheikh and Beheira, where he got 425,514 and 905,878 votes respectively. Shafiq got 342,491 votes in Kafr al-Sheikh and 640,633 votes in Beheira.
6:00 am: Port Said, a city that voted predominantly for Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi in the first round of elections, gave Shafiq the lead in the runoff, with 130,122 votes, while Morsy got only 109,768 votes out of a total of 436,703 votes.
Shafiq also swept Sharqiya, like he did in the first round of elections, with 1,074,262 votes against 882,978 for Morsy. More than 56 percent of eligible voters in the governorate cast their ballot, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm.
Shafiq continued to lead in the Delta, with results from the Delta city of Monufiya showing that he got 808,877 votes while Morsy got 329,183.
In Gharbiya, Shafiq got 982,626 votes while Morsy got 372,847 in a 47 percent voter turnout across the governorate.
5:00 am: Morsy is keeping the lead in the polls with 1,276,388 votes, while Shafiq has some 912,806 votes only. Alexandria, home to some 348 polling stations and more than 3 million voters, gave Sabbahi the first position in the coastal city in the first round of the election.
4:00 am: Morsy's campaign claims victory, saying that the Muslim Brotherhood candidate has clinched 52.5 percent of the vote. In a press conference at their headquarters in Cairo, the campaign also announced that Shafiq got about 47 percent of the vote. Counting has been completed at slightly more than 97 percent of polling stations. After the announcement, a handful of Morsy supporters chanted, "The free revolutionaries will continue to victory!" and "Down with military rule!"
According to the Freedom and Justice Party's count, 23,841,259 have cast votes, or over 45 percent of the 50 million eligible voters. That number, which is based on 97 percent of polling stations, is expected to rise.
Hatem Bagato, the secretary general of the Presidential Elections Commission, said on Saturday that voter turnout was 40 percent. Turnout during the first round of the election was over 45 percent.
Activists who opposed both the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate and former President Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister had launched a campaign to boycott the election in recent weeks, hoping that a low turnout would raise questions about the legitimacy of the election.
3:30 am: As the counting carries on in several polling stations in Cairo, home to more than 11 percent of voters, the gap between Morsy and Shafiq tightens. The heavily Coptic neighborhood of Shubra overwhelmingly favored Shafiq with 41,475 votes while Morsy got 11,682. In the mostly affluent neighborhood of Nasr City, Shafiq garnered 27,020 votes while Morsy got 23,090, according to Al-Ahram. Similarly, in Heliopolis, Shafiq led with 33,500 while Morsy got 17,500, Al-Ahram reported. Results were much closer in the working-class neighborhood of Mattareya, where Shafiq leads with about 98,000 votes to Morsy's 96,000, the state-run daily said. In the downtown neighborhood of Abdeen, Shafiq got 17,645 votes while Morsy got 9,119.
3:00 am: Various counts so far still give Morsy the lead but the figures vary and the gap is tightening. At 2 am the Freedom and Justice Party said that Morsy got 55 percent of the vote nationwide, ahead of Shafiq with 45 percent. Forty-five minutes later new numbers from the party lowered Morsy's share to 52 percent.
Independent newspaper Al-Shorouk said that after counting 3,922 polling stations, Morsy had 3,220,052 votes to 2,702,467 for Shafiq. Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr reported that Morsy got 26,281 votes at 31 polling stations in Cairo, while Shafiq got 47,986 votes.
Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that after counting 46 polling stations in Qalyubiya, Shafiq beat Morsy with 53,273 votes to 21,140.
Fayoum, which has 1.55 million eligible voters, is expected to announce the final results shortly after 32 more polling stations are counted. Morsy is expected to dominate there, as he already has 538,145 votes to Shafiq's 149,139.
Ismailia, which has the largest number of voters in the Suez Canal region with 700,515 according the state statistics agency, is close to announcing the final results after counting 194 polling stations out of 201. So far, Morsy has 55 percent of the vote there.
In nearby Suez, with 225,218 eligible voters, Morsy is leading with 109,298 votes compared to 64,973 for Shafiq.
Alexandria, which has the fifth-largest number of voters in the country with 3.29 million, gave Morsy the lead with 971,096 votes while Shafiq won 712,027 votes in the coastal city.
2:00 am: In the working-class Cairo neighborhood of Bab al-Shaariya, which has around 66,000 eligible voters, turnout was slightly over 50 percent, with 34,868 voters. Shafiq took 21,342 while Morsy took 12,034. This could prove indicative of how Cairo's large population will be divided between the two candidates. Morsy's campaign was expected to do better in poor and working class neighborhoods like Bab al-Shaariya than in other parts of the capital.
Meanwhile, a Brotherhood official told Reuters that Morsy had 51 percent of the votes from a quarter of polling stations counted so far nationwide, compared to 49 percent for Shafiq. The group had earlier said Morsy had a commanding lead after Sunday's vote but that was based on just 10 percent of polling stations counted.
1:30 am: While Mohamed Morsy continues to lead in most governorates, Ahmed Shafiq is keeping his chances of victory alive by taking the majority in populous Nile Delta governorates like Monufiya.
Crucially, tallies have not yet been released from Cairo and Giza, which account for over 10 percent of Egypt's population.
Morsy is ahead in Damietta with 154,174 votes, while Shafiq took 118,460 votes. The Brotherhood's candidate also leads in Sohag in Upper Egypt, with 374,444 votes to Shafiq's 256,122.
In Suez, Morsy currently leads with 94,448 votes, while Shafiq has 54,995 votes. In conservative North Sinai, the Islamist candidate is dominating with 43,250 compared to Shafiq's 23,963. In Qena, which saw the lowest voter turnout during the first round of the election, Morsy has 32,301 and Shafiq 26,660 votes.
But Shafiq is leading in the Delta, which has nearly 20 million voters, or 40 percent of the electorate. In Monufiya, the former prime minister has 215,829 votes, more than double Morsy's 85,204. Shafiq is leading also in Gharbiya and Sharqiya. Both governorates are still in the very beginning of the counting process. Shafiq has 32,283 and 26,385 in Sharqiya and Gharbiya respectively, while Morsy has 22,507 and 15,142.
12:30 am: Independent daily Al-Shorouk reported that Morsy is leading with 1,163,394 votes while Shafiq has 922,228 based on 1,629 polling stations.
Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr said that Shafiq is leading in the Delta governorates of Sharqiya, Gharbiya and Monufiya, which he also carried in the first round of voting.
In Monufiya, home governorate of ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Shafiq has 86,688 votes while Morsy has 34,204. In Gharbiya, Shafiq has 26,385 votes to 15,142 for Morsy.
In Minya, the most populated governorate in Upper Egypt, figures show that Morsy is leading with 8,583 votes while Shafiq has 4,998.
The Upper Egyptian governorate of Sohag has given Morsy the most votes so far, 208,526, while Shafiq has 133,561. In the first round, Morsy finished first in most Upper Egyptian governorates.
In the working class district of Helwan, Cairo, home of various factories, Morsy leads with 4,564 votes so far, while Shafiq has 3,276.
In a large discrepancy, Morsy garnered 6,669 votes in Siwa, in the Western Desert, while Shafiq got 160.
12:00 am: In North Sinai, Morsy leads with 15,438 votes as opposed to 5,621 for Shafiq. In the first round, Morsy also came in first in North Sinai, while Shafiq finished third.
11:45 pm: The official website of the Muslim Brotherhood, IkhwanWeb, reported that Morsy has garnered 842,577 votes while Shafiq has 541,785 from 1,274 polling stations nationwide.
11:30 pm: Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr reported that Morsy has 209,920 votes nationwide while Shafiq has garnered 129,188.
In the Upper Egyptian governorate of Sohag, Morsy is leading with 100,756 votes while Shafiq has 52,842.
The Freedom and Justice Party's Facebook page has been issuing results from polling stations where Morsy is leading. They say that in seven polling stations in Assiut, Upper Egypt, Morsy has received 23,182 votes (75 percent) while Shafiq has only 7,690 votes (25 percent).
In the Upper Egyptian governorate of Sohag, Morsy is leading the polls with 66.6 percent of votes while Shafiq has 33.4 percent.
After counting in seven polling stations in Fayoum, Morsy has 8,048 votes (78.5 percent) while Shafiq has 1,143 (21.2 percent). In the first round of the election, Morsy's best showing was in Fayoum, where he received 48 percent of votes.
The Twitter account of the Muslim Brotherhood's official website, IkhwanWeb, reported that in Kafr al-Sheikh, home governorate of former candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi, who finished third in the first round of elections, Morsy has received 29,421 votes and Shafiq 18,329 with 67 polling stations reporting. In the first round, Sabbahi dominated the governorate with 63 percent of votes.
In Daqahlia, Morsy has garnered 1,050 votes and Shafiq 1,138 with 73 polling stations reporting. In Beni Suef, Morsy leads with 9,491 votes over Shafiq's 4,182 with seven polling stations reporting.
An Egypt Independent reporter in North Sinai said that at the Kosaima polling station, Morsy received 689 votes and Shafiq 186. At the Amal School in Rafah, North Sinai, Morsy garnered 149 votes and Shafiq 101.
11:00 pm: Vote counting started on time at the polling station at the Taleea School in the central Cairo neighborhood of Sayeda Zeinab. The turnout is low and the vote counting is proceeding quickly.
The judge poured ballots out of the box and six assistants helped to unfold them. To entertain themselves, they read out some of the statements written on the ballots by nullifiers. One of them read, "God's punishment is great." After finding two ballots where the voter wrote Hamdeen Sabbahi, the Nasserist candidate who came in third in the first round of the election, the judge said, "We'll see the strangest things tonight."
There are two representatives for each candidate in the polling station, though there should technically only be one. They are carefully watching the counting process.
The judge decided to do the tallying and the counting simultaneously. The judge is tallying, while two assistants are counting the votes of each candidate and another two count the invalid ballots.
At another counting station nearby, the tallying is a bit more chaotic. Ballots are scattered on the table, each side of the table is assigned to one candidate and 18 hands are putting ballots on their respective sides and organizing them in piles. Every assistant counts one pile and puts it in piles of 100. They are rushing the process because the room is extremely hot, and they had to turn off the fan because it might blow away the ballots.
10:30 pm: According to state-run Al-Ahram newspaper's website, Morsy has garnered 9,993 votes while Shafiq has received 3,419 in some polling stations from five different governorates.
In Aswan, Shafiq currently has 471 votes and Morsy 464. In Damietta, Morsy has received 1,215 and Shafiq 584. In Sharqiya, Morsy has received 2,369 votes and Shafiq 1,313. In Beni Suef, Morsy has won 607 and Shafiq 214. In Sohag, Morsy has 5,338 votes and Shafiq 837.
10:00 pm: Some polling stations closed their doors earlier than 10 pm. According to independent daily Al-Shorouk, initial vote counting in 21 polling stations around the country show that Morsy has garnered 22,488 votes, while Shafiq has 9,598.
The Facebook page of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party says that preliminary results in the Upper Egyptian city of Sohag and the Nile Delta city of Kafr al-Sheikh also show Morsy in the lead.
