Election Fraud, Civil Society Awakening and the Diaspora's role
A roundtable on Election/Post-Election developments in Armenia was organized by Policy Forum Armenia, on April 8, 2013, in Washington, D.C.
On February 18, 2013, Armenia witnessed a presidential poll, which left many independent observers questioning the integrity of the election process. Assessments by Policy Forum Armenia (PFA) and other observers put the opposition candidate ahead of the incumbent in polling stations where little or no fraud was observed. In polling stations where massive fraud was observed, the incumbent came ahead, having lost all major cities with the exception of the capital Yerevan, which he carried narrowly due to a small number of polling stations with suspiciously high turnout. The objectives of this roundtable discussion are to shed light on the mechanics of the election fraud observed in Armenia on February 18, 2013 and more importantly to discuss the ways forward for Armenia and the Armenian nation as a whole, ahead of important milestones—an official inauguration and large-scale protests and counter-inauguration by opposition, both scheduled on April 9.
Speakers:
Zaven Kalayjian, Ph.D
Executive Board Member, Policy Forum Armenia
Garo Ghazarian, Esq.
Chairman, Armenian Bar Association
Alex Sardar
Civil Society Activist
Moderator:
Hrach Gregorian, Ph.D.
President, Institute of World Affairs
When: 6pm on Monday, April 8, 2013
Where: Faculty Conference Center, George Washington University Law School,
2000 H Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052
Policy Forum Armenia (www.pf-armenia.org) is an independent professional non-profit association aimed at strengthening discourse on Armenia's economic development and national security and through that helping to shape public policy in Armenia.
There are couple of things that were not taken into consideration. First of all if someone will take the number of officially declared voters and will divide on the number of voting stations and subsequently divide on the hours of elections we can obtain number of voters per minute, which will show,
1500 000 / 1892 /10/60 =1.3 persons per minute during 10 hours ()
1. in this case anyone could observe ongoing lineups at voting stations during at least 10 hours, which never happened.
2. The fact ,that the quantity of voters per voting stations was not the same and it could vary from 300 to lets say 1500, then obviously in some cases one could observe bottle necks at voting stations. in this case one can calculate that part of the voter would not have a chance to vote at all. For example if we will increase the possible passage of people through voting stations twice its becoming obvious that its practically impossible to provide voting for 2.6 people per minute or which means devote 23 sec per person. I wouldn't say that Armenians are small donuts that can be cooked in 20 seconds and by taking into consideration the sequence of procedures that any voter should do after entering the voting station it becomes obvious that its not possible.
3. Finally , prior to elections it was announced that we have officially registered 2500000 voters, This fact tells us that if 60% of population are adults ,having a right to vote ,then we have 40% who didn't participated in the voting. This numbers lead us to the fact that we have 3.5 million citizens. After deduction of the quantity of Armenians who officially left Armenia during last 20 years and by taking into consideration the official number of birth rate by years and the death rate we can come up to a number ,which is absurd. I would like to note ,that no one has argued the number of citizens...
For points No. 1 and 2, see the forthcoming (if not already published) Report by the Transparency International Armenia Anti-Corruption Center. They have some hourly data, which is pretty telling (along the lines of what he suggests).
For point No. 3, see PFA's 2012 report at: http://www.pf-armenia.org/document/armenians-2012-parliamentary-election. There is a very detailed look at the issue of population vs. voters.
Hope this helps.