Articles 2 and 8 of Armenia’s Electoral Code clearly state that the right to vote in parliamentary elections belongs to individuals who: (1) hold Armenian citizenship, (2) are at least 18 years old, and (3) are registered on the voter list. Anyone who meets these three conditions has the right to elect the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia. The law does not say that people with dual citizenship, or citizens who, say, spend 11 months a year abroad and only one month in Armenia, are deprived of that right.
Whether such restrictions should exist or not—I don’t know. But this is what the law says, and it is something we are all supposed to abide by. When members of the Civil Contract party exclaim, “we will not allow these people—or those people—to vote,” it reflects, to put it mildly, their very shaky grasp of statehood, legality, and democracy.
No one—except the law—should determine whether a given individual has the right to vote. Otherwise, we end up saying that “only good people” (patriotic, kind, decent, respectful of Armenia’s sovereignty) should have the right to vote. But that introduces subjective, value-based criteria that can easily lead to arbitrariness at different levels.
No matter how unsavory figures like Don Pipo, Ketrin Mihran, or other odious personalities may be, they should not, in principle, be deprived of the right to vote. Even if such individuals come to Armenia and end up in detention facilities, they would still retain that right.
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It is, of course, clear what concerns Civil Contract and why they tailor their messaging to what they clearly think is their voters’ intellectual level: “You roam around Russia, make money there, and then come here to decide who governs?” But I think these concerns are exaggerated. Those who write things like “кетце мер хзор варчапеты” (“long live our mighty prime minister,” written in a mock-Russianized Armenian),on social media, are most likely living in Russia themselves.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
