File photo: Sara Soliman, center, from the Queens borough of New York, takes part in a demonstration near the United Nations headquarters in New York celebrating Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's resignation, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011. (Photo: AP)
The Egyptian American Coalition has demanded that Egyptians overseas be allowed to vote using their passports instead of their National ID cards as the law stipulates.
The coalition says that many Egyptian Americans do not hold National ID cards and therefore would not be able to vote in the presidential elections scheduled for June.
The demand was announced was during a gathering organised by the coalition and attended by Judge Mahmoud El-Khodeiry, head of the Constitutional and Legislative Committee in parliament, Ahmed ElBorei, former minister of manpower, Mona El-Talawy, the head of the National Council for Women, activist Mamdouh Hamza, and Judge Noha El-Zeiny.
During last year's parliamentary elections, out of the more than seven million Egyptian expats only 355,569 registered on embassy websites to vote. One of the reasons cited was that many Egyptians in the US, Canada and Australia did not visit Egypt often and never got National ID cards.
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