Presidential candidates Hamdeen Sabahi and Abul Ezz Al-Hariri filed on Sunday a lawsuit to an administrative court calling for stopping the publication of presidential election opinion polls of Al-Ahram and Al-Masry Al-Youm newspapers.

The polls conducted by both newspapers before the election “lack credibility and professionalism,” the two plaintiffs said.

The polls conducted had many irregularities and mistakes regarding how they were conducted, the sample size and quality, all of which are governed by strict rules to ensure the quality and trustworthiness of the results, Sabahi and Al-Hariri said. Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper made the same mistake, they added.

“These polls lacked objectivity especially because Magda Othman, the one who conducted the polls, was responsible for conducting all surveys and opinion polls under former president Hosni Mubarak,” Sabahi and Al-Hariri stated.

They added that these surveys “directly affected the voters” and altered their decisions regarding who to vote for.

The Supreme Presidential Elections Commission’s electoral regulations state that no media organisation is allowed to publish any surveys on the presidential election unless it announces the body that conducted the survey, the body that funded it, the questions it included, the size of the sample and its geographical location, the method by which it was conducted, the data-collecting method and the potential percentage of error the poll may contain.