“I want to attach more importance to the fact that there are no coincidences in the work planned and carried out by my team, including the election campaign. In that sense, we want to manage process in such a way that supporting our ideas becomes everyone’s personal achievement, regardless of whether he is an ordinary citizen, a candidate for president or a representative of the ruling elite. We are convinced that it is much quicker and more honorable to achieve results through constructive cooperation than through confrontation and violence,” Arman Melikyan, a candidate for president, said during a conversation with www.aravot.am in response to the joint statement of candidates for president Hrant Bagratyan, Paruyr Hayrikyan, and Raffi Hovhannisyan. “We think that it is necessary to make public the lists of citizens who are absent from the country and are deprived of executing their right to vote, which is a violation of the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia. We think that the list of Armenian citizens who have been absent from the country for more than 180 days in the past year, but are included in the voter registration lists should be hung in the polling stations separate from the main lists, in order to rule out voting instead of citizens who are absent from the country,” the joint statement of the presidential candidates reads.
Let us remind that Arman Melikyan, a candidate for president, talked about making public the list of voters who were absent from the country as early as after the 2008 election, stating that that election was illegitimate because of that. And roughly two weeks ago, Arman Melikyan requested from the Central Election Commission (CEC), as the body ensuring the legitimacy of elections, to make public those lists.
The joint statement of the candidates for president doesn’t mention that they agree with this proposal of Arman Melikyan. Arman Melikyan wasn’t involved in preparing the joint statement either. Whereas Melikyan thinks that if the mentioned candidates had joined him when he made a request to the CEC, that issue would have been solved already. Nonetheless, “No worries, they have joined late. I think that they have joined our demands. In any case, this is joining efforts to solve the issue and another testimony that our demand is legitimate and is supported not only by other candidates for president, but also by the public. Such things are apprehended only thanks to the public support.”
Nelly GRIGORYAN
