ARMENIA: ELECTION CENTERS MORE ON PROCESS THAN RESULTS
EurasiaNet.org
Feb 18 2013
February 18, 2013 – 2:23pm, by Marianna Grigoryan
With the official outcome of Armenia’s February 18 vote widely seen
as a given, attention within the country is instead focusing on the
election process itself.
The favorite, incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan, 58, faces six
competitors, although his closest contender, the American-born Raffi
Hovhannisian, the 53-year-old head of the tiny opposition Heritage
Party and a onetime Armenian foreign minister, has been trailing the
president by some 40-percentage points in recent opinion polls.
The final struggle between the two men, though, could come down more
to alleged election violations, than to percentages of the vote won.
Hovhannisian’s campaign already has compiled and distributed a long
list of grievances about alleged vote-tampering by local officials,
a body made up overwhelmingly of members from Sargsyan’s Republican
Party of Armenia.
In comments to RFE/RL, President Sargsyan said that whether or not the
vote had been fair would only be known ” after the election results
have been summarized.”
Preliminary results will be released by the evening of February 19,
with final results coming a week later.
Yet, based on initial reports from Armenian media and watchdog
organizations, some bad habits from elections past appear to be dying
hard. “The election violations are just the same as during the previous
poll” in 2008, said political analyst Armen Badalian.
“The violations have become less significant in terms of visibility,
since the number of participants has decreased, ” Badalian continued.
The country’s largest opposition force, the Armenian National Congress,
decided against running a candidate, and another opposition group,
the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, has called on supporters to
destroy their ballots. A powerful party sitting astride the political
fence, Prosperous Armenia, also opted to sit the vote out.
The ability to erase passport stamps from polling stations that
indicated the bearer had voted was among the chief complaints from
the field. The Central Election Commission argued that the stamps
could not be removed, but videos of the procedure posted by online
news outlets suggested otherwise.
Other familiar claims — alleged ballot-box stuffing, voter bribes,
voter transportation, and voter “coaching” — were all there,
too. As were reports of alleged retribution against those highlighting
problems. After Gala TV, a pro-opposition regional television station
published a report that buses allegedly belonging to oligarch Samvel
Aleksanian, a parliamentarian from the Republican Party, had been
supposedly used for carousel-voting, the station’s website crashed
from a DDoS attack.
In its last pre-election report, observers from the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutes
and Human Rights had flagged reported abuse of administrative resources
as another concern.
In a January video interview with RFE/RL, however, President Sargsyan
downplayed the notion that local officials are misbehaving by taking
an active role in the campaign. “And why shouldn’t they use their
leadership – I mean, their prestige – for their political party or
for ensuring the victory of their party’s leader?” he asked.
The government, he asserted, has created “a competitive environment”
for the vote.
For a country awash in unemployment and corruption, struggling with
an ongoing exodus of workers, the fear of fresh war with one of its
neighbors, Azerbaijan, and failed attempts at peace with a second,
Turkey, the reasons to vote could appear many.
But with a campaign more about personalities than policies – a few
candidates themselves even opposed the vote as “fraudulent” — many
voters believed they had few meaningful choices.
“I haven’t seen such elections before. People have no hope at all.
They don’t even know why they’ve come here,” one 30-something male
voter at a downtown Yerevan polling station commented.
Some voters preferred to spoil their ballots by voting for
Armenian-American celebrity socialite Kim Kardashian or Soviet cartoon
character Cheburashka or simply writing down quotes from Sargsyan’s
various campaign rallies. Another voter decided to eat his ballot as
a sign of protest.
Officials nonetheless reported a substantial voter turnout, albeit not
one indicative of energetic enthusiasm. When the polls closed at 8pm,
the Central Election Commission reported voter turnout at 60.05-percent
of Armenia’s registered 1,518,407 voters; about 10-percentage points
less than in 2008.
Some observers, though, call the reported turnout “dubious.”
“This is illogical,” commented Artur Sakunts, head of the Vanadzdor
office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly, human-rights watchdog that is
fielding election observer groups. “If the previous [2008] elections
were held in an atmosphere of competition and voters were active as
they wanted to cast a vote for the candidate and the political force
they were supporting, then high activity reported during this election
is very doubtful.”
In 2008, thousands of people united around the opposition movement
led by former President Levon Ter-Petrosian, but the fatal clashes
between police and protesters that left ten people dead following
the vote dampened the campaign enthusiasm of many.
Asked in a Yerevan polling station (named “9/11”) about his own
choice for president, Ter-Petrosian jested drily that he would cast
a ballot for all seven of the presidential candidates since “All of
them deserve that.”
Sargsyan, also casting his ballot at the 9/11 station, told journalists
that he had voted “for the future of Armenia . . . for a secure
Armenia, for the safety of our citizens and families.”
But few see those goals as meaning much in the way of real change for
Armenia. “Tomorrow will be just the same as yesterday,” disparagingly
commented Manvel Sarkisian, director of the Yerevan-based Armenian
Center for National and International Studies.
Editor’s note: Marianna Grigoryan is a freelance reporter based in
Yerevan and the editor of MediaLab.am.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66572