World: Saudi Women Vote Ban Remains In Place During Elections

Saudi Arabia is considering allowing women to vote in municipal elections this year but they would still be barred from running for office, a senior government official has said.

Last March, Saudi authorities stated that half the seats in the municipal council in the next September 2011 run would be elected, rather than selected by the monarch himself as usual. But when they implemented elections, they neglected to include women’s votes.


Many Saudis have privately expressed their doubts about the wisdom of denying women the right to vote in the Sept. 22 municipal elections. Last month a small group of women staged a protest outside the voter registration office in Jeddah. In Makkah, a woman filed a lawsuit in administrative court against the Ministry of Municipal Affairs for denying women the right to register to vote.

Yet results from a poll released last month by the Riyadh-based ASBAR Center for Studies, Research and Communications conflict with Arab and Western media reports that Saudis generally support women’s right to vote.

The study reported that 59 percent of Saudis opposed women voting and 72.5 percent were against women as members on councils. The study reported that 72.7 percent of the polled Saudis voted in the 2005 elections because it was an act of national pride and patriotism.

Perhaps the most striking revelation of the study – aside from its conclusions about women’s rights – was the generational gap in voter interest. Three-quarters of the Saudi men who registered to vote were over the age of 46. Only 40.4 percent of Saudis between the ages of 21 and 29 registered to vote.

Architectural consultant Nadia Bakhurji believes that female voter participation legitimizes the election. Bakhurji said she was planning her candidacy in September’s municipal election when the government announced that no women would be candidates or allowed to vote.

“Honestly, the news was so surprising,” said Bakhurji, a board member of the Saudi Council of Engineers. “In the past two years there have been positive steps in the progress of women and this would have been a natural step. There is no excuse for us not to participate.”

Almost six years have passed and nothing has changed, proving only that logistic-related difficulties are only an excuse for not making changes.

“Women will not participate in this session,” Abdul- Rahman al-Dahmash, director of the kingdom’s electoral commission, said referring to the municipal balloting. “There is a plan, though not with a definite time, to put in place a framework so that women can participate in upcoming elections.”


The Ahmadiyya Post, Saudi Arabia. By Zubair Ahmed. Sept 14,2011