by Susanna Petrosyan, Yerevan. Exclusively for VK
Armenia will start the parliamentary electoral campaign in two days. 8 parties and a bloc have registered at the CEC for the elections on May 6. The Republican Party of Armenia, its partner Prosperous Armenia and the non-parliamentary bloc the Armenian National Congress are the favourites. Parliamentary opposition parties Dashnaktsutyun and Heritage have chances of entering the parliament.
Only 9 associations will take part in the parliamentary elections for the first time since 1995. Before that, there were about 20 parties to vote for. Observers and the opposition have concerns about electoral lists. Armenia has registered its highest number of voters, 2.5 million. Armenia registered a negative migration balance in 2008. According to the census of late 2011, the population of Armenia was 2,871,509. Ovanes Kocharyan, head of the Department for Passports and Visas of the Police, said: “Firstly, it is due to an increase of the number of people aged 18. Secondly, interest in realization of social rights encourages people to go on the electoral register, according to the law. Because many have not done that before. A certain number is composed of people that received Armenian citizenship.”
But there are instances of exaggerated electoral lists. One of the polling stations at the center of Yerevan had voters with the same name, starting with number 661 and ending with 1223. The police explained that it was a technical error.
Another instance was the registering of 101 people in a single apartment. Most of them are Georgian citizens. The police say that the people were registered at the apartment with the permission of its owner, which is not a violation of the law. The law on dual citizenship in Armenia grants them Armenian citizenship and they have been put on the electoral register. But Georgian law lacks dual citizenship, so they were supposed to cancel their Georgian citizenships. The case is being investigated.
Dead people in the Armenian electoral processes have become common practice. This includes Fadey Sargsyan, head of the Soviet government of Armenia and President of the National Academy of Sciences, who died 2 years ago.
Stepan Safaryan, a member of the Council of the Heritage Party said: “Usually the number of voters is 60-65% of the population of Armenia, or about 1.6 million people. Data in the electoral lists is exaggerated and is controversial according to a set of arguments.”
Levon Ter-Petrosyan, former President of Armenia and leader of the Armenian National Congress, believes that exaggerated lists are the main resource of the Armenian authorities to falsify the election results. “It is the most serious resource to corrupt the results of elections by the authorities, which cannot be compared even with such things as forcing, beating and bribing of voters. This is why the government rejected the initiative of the opposition to publish the lists of people taking part in voting,” Ter-Petrosyan said, promising to discuss the issue with the authorities of the OSCE ODIHR and ambassadors of Western states.
Armenian Police Chief Vladimir Gasparyan ordered his officers to be consistent in preventing violations of the law. Armenian Prosecutor General Agvan Ovsepyan, besides forming a working group, organized a special office for complaints and reports. But the problem of exaggerated lists remains. The process of falsification of elections continues its development: from using violence at polling stations, taking opposition hostages, mass stuffing of ballot boxes, electoral bribes and other actions to more “civilized” methods of fraud, excluding violence. In particular, using administrative resources for organizing “voting” for citizens that do not live in the country.
The opposition has found antidotes to many technologies for falsifying elections, but the latest innovation remains immune.
