The ARF organized a meeting with campaign headquarters members, ARF representatives in the electoral commissions and proxies in the hall of Moscow Cinema yesterday. After this meeting had been over, www.aravot.am tried to get a clarification from Armen Rustamyan, a representative of the ARF Supreme Body in Armenia, whether there were polling stations on the territory of Armenia, in which the ARF hadn’t managed to appoint commission members for some reason or in which representatives of other forces had been appointed by the quotas given to it. “No, there are no such examples. We have used all possibilities we could and our people are appointed in all polling stations, proxies and their substitutes are also there and are ARF members. Even those who couldn’t fill in their spots and applied to us, we even filled in those spots,” stated Armen Rustamyan.
Responding to our question whether he had hopes that as opposed to the previous election, this time the ARF would be able to protect its votes, Rustamyan said, “Yes, I think. We have generally and mainly always protected our and not only our, but also the people’s votes. This time, there are more possibilities to do that.” And in response to an observation that as a result of the previous both general and Yerevan City Council elections, the ARF had stated that its votes had been rigged, the representative of the ARF Supreme Body said that election fraud took place even in those cases, when the percentage of votes decreased as a result of artificially increasing the number of voters. In that case, according to Armen Rustamyan, it is possible that the votes of a certain political force are maintained, but against the background of increased number of participation the party may lose. “At the end of the day, the distribution of seats is decided, according to the percentage and it is the expanded list of voters, multiple votes etc., which we have to be able to prevent,” said Rustamyan.
If the ARF votes are rigged again in this way or another, will the ARF take to the streets? “We said that very thing during this meeting. We must make a decision based on the information given by our friends, representatives of the polling stations, whether the election fraud has been as much as to have an impact on the election results or not. All our next steps will depend on this. Certainly, if we register that the election fraud was to such an extent that it had an impact on the election results, we will raise the issue of finding the election void and will start a political process.” Will it be as timidly as it was after the previous election? “We have never been timid. We didn’t manage to completely register the fact of election fraud, in order to file a petition in the Constitutional Court and not to lose or have proper amount of proofs, in order that our statements on the fraud may not be just political statements. We need to have legal grounds, proofs and evidence, which we should obtain with the help of our very members of commissions. If our conclusions are made on
those grounds, we will be quick to take action,” said Armen Rustamyan, a representative of the ARF Supreme Body, in response to a question of www.aravot.am.
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Naira MAMIKONYAN
