According to Arsen Hambardzumyan, an ARF candidate for city council, electoral fraud in the city council election took place outside polling places. That is the reason why the ARF, as opposed to the Armenian National Congress (ANC) and Hello Yerevan Coalition, hasn’t requested a vote recount in any polling place. “With regard to the work of polling place commissions, election campaign, I must say that it was normal, but the electoral fraud transpired mostly outside polling place commissions in the form of the administrative resource and election bribes…. We have been able to exercise supervision through our poll-watchers and commission members, so that there was no significant case of fraud in polling places. Therefore, we see no point in challenging the results. So it is not possible to fix what happened outside the premises of polling places by challenging,” Mr. Hambardzumyan said. In his words, they had related all the alerts received on their hotline on the election day to the police. “Our members gave proper explanations of those cases, but we haven’t seen any real result. And if there had been such a wish, one would have been able to prevent everything that was happening outside the premises of polling places.”
We inquired of Mr. Hambardzumyan how he would explain the ARF’s winning few votes. “A large part of the opposition electorate didn’t actively participate in the election; it was one of the reasons why non-government forces won quite few votes. The second reason is that election bribes and use of the administrative resource played a big part; the third reason is that our compatriots didn’t believe after all that one could make substantial changes not only in the capital, but also across the country through the city council election. Here the non-government forces have a task to think, analyze why they failed to fill our compatriots with that hope and, seizing that opportunity, try to change the situation in the whole of the country. The next reason that had a substantial impact on the results was the fusion of the state and the current government or their acting as one. In our country, the government is equated with the state. In this case, political forces don’t struggle with political methods, but rather non-government forces are compelled to struggle against the political machine, and in this sense, the opportunities are not equal.
“The next reason may be that the social demand is not met. Society wants the opposition to be united, and that expectation was not fulfilled.” We also inquired of the ARF city council candidate why the voter had preferred the Hello Yerevan Coalition among opposition forces, casting more votes for the coalition. “The Heritage Party represented by the Hello Yerevan Coalition has also regressed considerably in terms of both the total amount of votes and percentages. Therefore, one shouldn’t consider from the perspective of getting more or fewer votes. The Hello Yerevan Coalition was able to cross the threshold, because not much time had passed since the presidential election. However, if we compare the total amount and percentage of votes won by Raffi Hovhannisyan in the presidential election with those won by the Hello Yerevan Coalition in the city council election, we must state again that there has been considerable regress…, everyone has regressed. Every political force should make a serious analysis and, drawing adequate conclusions, choose the right tactic of struggle, expecting future success.”
Arpine SIMONYAN
