Aravot, Armenia
Feb 13 2008
The falsification mechanisms are known: The opposition will try to
prevent them happening on polling day
by Naira Mamikonyan
As the day of the 19 February presidential election approaches,
tensions are rising both in the republic as a whole and in the
Malatia-Sebastia District [of Yerevan]. The Armenian authorities
represented by some agencies, as well as the team of presidential
candidate and Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, are not only collecting
passports and inflicting violence on supporters of opposition
candidates, in this case supporters of [former president] Levon
Ter-Petrosyan, but are also continually developing new election fraud
mechanisms.
Of course, the experts in election know-how will not be reinventing
the wheel. They will make use of the options tried and tested in the
previous parliamentary election [in May 2007]. Incidentally, all of
them are connected with voter lists or passports. The mechanisms of
election fraud that were described in detail by representatives of
Ter-Petrosyan’s election headquarters in communities and regions can
be generalized from the example of specific communities –
Malatia-Sebastia and, let’s say, Yeghvard town in Kotayk Region and
the adjacent villages.
Thus, in particular, the voter lists made public after the
parliamentary election of 12 May 2007, which, according to statements
by the authorized policy body, should already have been cleansed,
remain essentially in the same condition and they have already been
hung up on the walls of local [polling] stations. As before, they
include the names of dead people, as well as completely unknown
persons registered at some addresses, and people who withdrew from
the registration [at a particular address]. There are buildings that
are not included in any voter lists, while there are addresses of
buildings that do not exist in reality. For example, apartment number
29 of building number 16 in the 1st Araratyan Massiv [a housing
estate in Yerevan] was not included in the list, while the other
residents of the same buildings will vote. The situation is the same
with apartment number 5 of building 8/1 on the same estate.
In Yeghvard, a number of people registered at the address 17,
Spandaryan Street, are completely unknown to the owner of the house,
Jivan Hovhannisyan. Meanwhile, it turns out that removing these
people from the voter list is a very difficult process. The thing is
that the owner of the house, Jivan Hohvhannisyan, tried to correct
the mentioned discrepancy. He was told by the agency responsible that
he should first apply to the appropriate body to receive a
confirmation that these unknown people are not in fact registered at
that address and then apply to a court to remove them from the
records. It is clear that this is an artificial delay, and the
election will be over by the time a citizen manages to prove that he
is not a camel.
This was a single example of the, to put it mildly, discrepancies in
voter lists, although several dozens pages of such cases have been
recorded in Ter-Petrosyan’s election headquarters.
As for the mechanisms of election fraud, we would like to present the
main one that members of these headquarters are aware of in order to
prevent it happening. According to them, the voter list that will be
hung up on the wall of a polling station on 19 February after being
finalized will be completely different from the list that will be at
the disposal of members of local [election] commissions.
Our source says that the authorities also hope to carry out abuses
with passports. According to some information, the visa and passports
department of the police has started to return many old passports to
passport departments, in particular, the passports of people who are
no longer Armenian citizens. Most likely these passports are to be
used for double or triple voting, and this mechanism will be used
particularly at those polling stations where, according to the
information of the authorities, there will be no Ter-Petrosyan
proxies or where they will not be sufficiently prepared, and they
will not have members in the commissions. One of the members of the
candidate’s election headquarters believes that this is the reason
that representatives of the authorities have now focused on the
proxies of their candidate and their commission people, whom they are
intimidating and trying to bribe. In particular, in Malatia-Sebastia
District there are many members of commissions whom they have not
managed to bribe or intimidate to win them over to the side of the
candidate from the authorities. Moreover, in many cases the mentioned
members of commissions failed to withstand these pressures and
preferred to just withdraw from the commissions themselves.
One of the fresh examples is Shmavon Galstyan, the chairman of the
commission located in the school number 112 in the same district
[Malatia-Sebastia], who was arrested recently and against whom a
criminal investigation was launched to punish him. He is one of
friends of [MP] Hakob Hakobyan, the chairman of the Ordeal of the
Spirit non-governmental organization, and refused to take part in the
election fraud at this polling station. Moreover, Hakobyan told
Aravot yesterday [12 February] that another three or four members of
local election commissions voluntarily or forcibly withdrew for the
same reasons, including some who were nominated by the [ruling]
Republican Party of Armenia. All of them are from Hakob Hakobyan’s
entourage and now find themselves at the centre of attention from the
police.
Of course, taking all this into consideration, Ter-Petrosyan
headquarters announces that the authorities will not have any chance
to carry out election falsifications and that such attempts will lead
to senseless clashes, for which authorities themselves will be held
accountable.