The ANC is going to challenge the decisions of the Central Election Commission (CEC) on the requests it has made regarding the city council election in the Administrative Court, and they might make complaints to the prosecutor’s office regarding individual cases of electoral fraud.
Mr. Khachatryan complains that the CEC and some electoral district commissions didn’t offer an opportunity to organize proper discussions on the results of individual polling places.
“There was no vote recount in some polling places where actions had been taken that were not in accordance with the law. If the requests for a vote recount were too many, they should have split into two groups and carried out the recount, in order to open all of them, but all that wasn’t done in polling place no. 8/22 without any explanation,” Mr. Khachatryan complained.
In his words, if all their requests for a vote recount had been granted, they would have revealed the whole mechanism of electoral fraud. “That same Central Election Commission denied the requests to find void the results of the vote in polling place no. 8/8, 8/9 and a set of other polling places….
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“The CEC acts arbitrarily and has decided to fulfill the functions of the Constitutional Court, instead of doing specific work it gives assessments and deprives us of the ability to protect our rights in accordance with the law.” He doesn’t agree with members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) that all cases of electoral fraud took place outside polling places. “They happened also inside. Now we should understand how come a record book disappears, a person who is a candidate for city council is a poll-watcher at different polling places.”
In response to our question why the ANC had won so few votes, Mr. Khachatryan explained: “The atmosphere is the reason. Voters were put under huge psychological pressure; people were not even allowed to go to polling places, people got tired of their behavior. You saw
who were gathered in the front yards of polling places. The whole background of the election testifies to the fact that here we are dealing not with the state, but with the Mob, and one had to overcome all the obstacles put by that Mob to turn out to vote. This election was a new phenomenon. The Mob was at the forefront and decided how the election should be held; the government followed the orders of that Mob.”
Arpine SIMONYAN
