Yesterday the Russian communists signed an agreement with the League of Voters, a social group. According to the agreement, a joint database of trustworthy election reports will be created. A similar agreement was signed by the representatives of another opposition candidate, Mikhail Prokhorov. Since the opposition assumes not groundlessly that the election reports will be mostly falsified – i.e. there will be different results in ballot boxes and on ballots, as well as various other papers – they have decided to focus on that field. The NGO is actually a mediator between the billionaire and the communists, who at least state that they will strive for fair elections.
If it can be done in immenseRussia, technically it can be done much easier in small Armenia. There are speculations that the establishment has half a million “reserve” votes – i.e. the establishment will attribute votes of the citizens that are not in the republic and those that will have not participated to itself. I don’t think half a million is not possible, but guess it is correct. 17 parties of the Armenian National Congress (ANC), as well as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), the Heritage Party and the Free Democrats, state that they have thousands of members. If it is so, let those thousands of people take on a simple task of clarifying how many voters there are inArmenia. (Since guest workers have already returned to their workplaces and will not return toArmeniawithin the next three months, that number will not have changed till the election). Let the above-mentioned parties follow the example of the Russian opposition, join their efforts and make their number public. When the official number is published, let them “give the lie” to the establishment, if those numbers differ. After “cleansing” the voting lists, the same parties can calculate on the election day with the same joint efforts how many people have really participated in the election. 500 000 “reserve” votes will be taken off the agenda by those two simple operations. Nonetheless, election bribe and pressure on workers of state institutions will remain. However, some questions occur to me here. Guess a chief physician or a school principal calls doctors or teachers and says that if they don’t vote for the establishment, he will fire them. Is there no opposition party supporter among those doctors or teachers, who will make that fact public? Or when the head of the public utility urges, “Come people, I have got bribe for you,” is there no resident, who doesn’t need that 5-10 thousand and who will inform oppositionists or mass media about that. Anyway, the opposition parties or parties advocating free elections should work here too. As yet, they have been mostly speaking. E.g., the ANC representatives utter the same formulas – “rule of bandits,” “criminal-oligarchic,” “criminal regime” – regardless of what is at issue. We got that, move on!
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
