Around 90 old residents of the Nork nursing home are deprived of the right to vote – the passport office refused to register them in the nursing home, reasoning “go and come back after the election.”
“They don’t register us, our voice is not heard. We have come, been admitted, but they haven’t registered us yet, now I demand, they don’t register. I am not registered anywhere, they have sold the house and have kicked me out. These people give bread and water, they provide with everything, now if we leave here, where should we go? They have offices, they have tightly grabbed their offices, and us, I am an 82-year-old woman, where shall I go, if they kick me out? If they kick me out of home, they will kick me out of town. They deprive us also of speech,” Marusya Sargsyan, a resident of the nursing home, complained during a conversation with www.aravot.am.
Another resident of the nursing home, Gohar Stepanyan, is registered, but not in Yerevan and since she has been living in the Nork nursing home since 2001, she wants to register here and to elect the MP of her district in her place of residence, however, the passport office told her to go and vote in her region. In response to a question of www.aravot.am why around 90 old people, living in the nursing home for years, hadn’t been registered yet, one of the officials of the nursing home assured that the management had changed 2 months before, “I don’t know why the former director hasn’t dealt with the registration of these people.”
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According to the nursing home official, they applied to their district passport office a month ago, the office had regularly delayed and they just didn’t register on the threshold of the election, “They told us as if they had been ordered from above not to conduct group registrations, should these people be deprived of voting? If one resides in our place, he has the right to be factually registered. There are residents who have registration, but they are registered in different parts of the city and the management cannot take 90 people to Davitashen, Avan or any other place, in order that they may vote.”
In this regard, Hovhannes Kocharyan, the head of the police passport and visa department, assured www.aravot.am that those old people who were registered out of the community of Yerevan could participate in the election through additional lists, however, those who were registered in Yerevan were not allowed by the law to participate in the election though additional lists – they had to vote in the place of their registration. In Mr. Kocharyan’s words, it
is necessary to have a mandatory factual registration to participate in the election though majoritarian representation, “Old people made a fuss, when they found out that they had to be unregistered from the previous place of residence to be factually registered. 8-10 days are required for factual registration. The passport office will print the lists soon and will not manage to conduct factual registrations. Those poor old people are put into buses so that they cast biased votes.”
As for the application of the management of the nursing home made a month before and denied, Mr. Kocharyan said, “Someone came and presented a list, telling to register everyone, our folks demanded an authorization, but they didn’t present an authorization and our folks didn’t register.”
Nelly BABAYAN
