Turnout Rises in Egypt, but the Vote Raises Doubts --- CAIRO — Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army field marshal who led last summer’s military takeover, won election as president with more than 90 percent of the vote, according to preliminary tallies Wednesday night. But it was the reported turnout that caught some by surprise. -- Officials said nearly 40 percent of the electorate had cast ballots, an unexpectedly strong showing after days of escalating panic in the government and the news media over the lack of voters at the polls. -- Supporters of Mr. Sisi had counted on a respectable turnout to legitimize his assumption of power after the ouster last summer of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s first fairly elected leader. But Mr. Sisi’s critics say the vote was so marred by irregularities that its outcome, including the turnout, was all but meaningless — except perhaps as the sign of a return to the era when strongmen like Hosni Mubarak won similarly predictable landslides. -- Mr. Sisi’s victory was never in doubt. A severely unbalanced and tightly restricted political process all but guaranteed it, driving away all but one opponent, Hamdeen Sabahi. -- Yet when Egyptians failed to show up in significant numbers for the scheduled two-day election on Monday and Tuesday, the military-backed government showed signs of desperation in its efforts to urge more people to the polls. Finally, as the scheduled two-day vote was about to end Tuesday night, election officials took the extraordinary step of adding a third day to the voting. -- The ultimate total was impossible to confirm independently. Mr. Sabahi abruptly withdrew all his monitors from the polls over the previous night, complaining that many were arrested or assaulted by the police for attempting to keep an eye on the ballots. Their pullout removed the last significant check on potential ballot stuffing. -- Around the same time, the website of the flagship state newspaper abruptly shifted to reporting “heavy turnout” in its banner headline even as private newspapers continued to report the opposite. -- “The state searches for a vote,” Al Masry Al Youm, a privately owned newspaper broadly supportive of Mr. Sisi, declared in its headline. -- “The ballot boxes searching for voters,” declared Al Shorouk, another private paper sympathetic to Mr. Sisi. - More, NYTimes