Alexander Pracht
A coalition of election monitoring groups known as the Independent Observer has criticized Armenia’s Central Electoral Commission for refusing to hold a rerun of the June 7 parliamentary elections at three polling stations where results were annulled due to violations on voting day.
After the Prosperous Armenia party fell just short of the 4% threshold required to enter parliament, and recounts failed to provide enough additional ballots, it and other opposition groups insisted that repeat voting should be held in those constituencies.
Also read: Election results confirmed, controversial ruling leaves Prosperous Armenia out of legislature
The electoral commission defended its decision, arguing that a rerun would expose the process to tactical voting.
“From the perspective of equal suffrage, […] a repeat vote may undermine the principle of voter equality, as one group of voters would be placed in substantially different circumstances from those under which the rest of the electorate cast their ballots,” the commission said in a statement on Monday.
Daniel Ioannisyan, the Independent Observer’s coordinator, rejected this reasoning in a Facebook post the same day.
“In simple words, [the electoral commission’s chairman] Vahagn Hovakimyan says that in the current situation, all pro-opposition voters in those constituencies, regardless of their political views, would vote for the Prosperous Armenia Party [in a re-vote] to push it beyond the threshold,” he said.
“It is an open question of how correct this regulation is, and whether it is worth reviewing. But it is a clear regulation written in black and white in the electoral code that there should be a rerun,” Ioannisyan added.
“The Independent Observer alliance believes that the Central Electoral Commission’s failure to schedule a rerun in [the aforementioned constituencies] is clearly and explicitly illegal,” Ioannisyan said in a statement released shortly after the decision was announced.
At the same time, the group said that the recount of ballots conducted at hundreds of polling stations over the past week was carried out accurately and transparently. However, it pointed to widespread vote-buying, which it said negatively affected the quality of the elections.
“[We believe] that the results recorded in the polling stations reflect the overall voter preference, but voter bribery was massive, which negatively affected the quality of the elections,” the group said in a statement on Saturday.
Armenian authorities had repeatedly accused opposition parties of vote buying throughout the campaign, as well as during and after the June 7 vote, citing hundreds of allegations, many supported by published recordings of phone calls where vote-buying schemes were discussed.
The Independent Observer is funded by the European Union, the Swedish government, the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, and the Democracy Development Foundation.
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