(CNN) -- They were outside every polling station I visited in Cairo: earnest young men bent over laptops on rickety tables, checking names and ID numbers against voting lists, explaining to people where they were supposed to vote, and, in light of Egypt's wildly complicated electoral system, how to vote. Scattered around the tables between the laptops were pamphlets and fliers for candidates of the Freedom and Justice Party, the newly established political wing of the once banned but now free and unfettered Muslim Brotherhood. "Who doesn't want freedom and justice?" a middle-aged man asked me approvingly as I leafed through a pamphlet over at one of the tables in the working class Cairo neighbourhood of Sayida Zaynab.
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Muslim Brotherhood members had to endure decades of persecution by Egyptian authorities
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It has drawn wide support in Egypt during times of crisis when the government was seen as slow
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It was widely involved in the protests that led to the fall of Hosni Mubarak's regime
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But it remained on sidelines during recent protests against the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces
The secrecy that alarms some @placeholder may have simply been a necessity to function in an environment where the secret police, the mukhabarat, and their army of informers were watching everyone.