Court urged to overturn no re-vote ruling

PanARMENIAN.Net - Daniel Ioannisyan, a representative of the Independent Observer monitoring mission, has said that the Central Electoral Commission’s decision not to order a re-vote is “entirely unlawful” and should be overturned by the Constitutional Court, Factor.am reports.

He was referring to the CEC’s decision not to hold repeat voting in polling stations 12/13, 10/51, and 36/65.

“I consider the statement by the CEC chair to be essentially equivalent to the Central Electoral Commission openly declaring that the law is wrong and therefore they are not going to follow it.

The commission stated that because more than 99 percent of voters had already expressed their will through voting, and because voters in those three polling stations would know what the election results looked like if a re-vote were held there, tactical voting would generally occur. In other words, voters would often cast ballots not according to their political preferences, but simply to produce a particular nationwide outcome. Translated into plain language, it roughly means that all opposition voters would vote for Prosperous Armenia because whether Prosperous Armenia secures representation would effectively be decided in those polling stations, while everything else has already been determined and voters know that,” Ioannisyan said.

According to him, there are two problems with this approach.

First, Ioannisyan argued that the justification presented by the CEC chair is manipulative because Prosperous Armenia had already received enough votes to clear the electoral threshold. However, in his assessment, the more important issue is that the possibility of tactical voting exists in any case when re-voting is conducted in individual polling stations.

“In other words, what does the legislator say? It says that re-voting in individual polling stations takes place two weeks after the election, meaning when everyone already knows the results from all other polling stations. Secondly, it says that re-voting in individual polling stations occurs when the votes in those stations are significant for the election outcome. Therefore, in any situation where re-voting takes place in individual polling stations, the same tactical voting will be observed. So what follows from that? Does it mean that on this basis the Central Electoral Commission can simply strike out the provisions on re-voting in individual polling stations from the Electoral Code? This is an obvious attempt by the Central Electoral Commission to assume powers that belong to the National Assembly,” he said.

Ioannisyan also stated that he expects the Constitutional Court to reverse the decision because, in his assessment, the Central Electoral Commission “unlawfully altered the voting results.”

In a statement by CEC Chair Hovakimyan, it was noted: “In the event of partial re-voting, the following problem arises. Voters who participated in the main vote cast their ballots when the overall result was unknown. They did not know who was leading, what the vote margin was, which force would pass the threshold, or what impact their vote would have on the final result. Meanwhile, voters participating in the re-vote would be voting in a different situation: the overall picture may already be known to them (in this case, the results from 99.8 percent of election participants).”