Opposition details election violations to CC

PanARMENIAN.Net - At the June 27 hearing of Armenia's Constitutional Court, opposition political forces presented their arguments regarding alleged electoral violations, attorney Aram Orbelyan told reporters.

"During the hearing, numerous reports of the misuse of administrative resources were presented. Our colleagues from the Armenia Alliance argued that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that several hundred million drams from the state budget were spent on the Civil Contract party's election campaign.

Representatives of the Wings of Unity Alliance stated that office rental costs in the same area differed significantly. In their case, the rent was around 200,000 drams or more, while the Civil Contract party reported approximately 20,000 drams in its campaign finance disclosures.

They have more than 500 campaign headquarters but zero employees. I assume they were afraid to pay salaries to avoid accusations of distributing vote-buying payments. It is obvious that either these workers were actually paid unofficially or, even if we assume the work was voluntary, those expenses should still have been included in the campaign fund expenditures," he said.

Orbelyan stressed that these allegations represented only part of the claimed violations.

"The Hayastan Alliance also presented specific calculations regarding signatures. There is a discrepancy of about 30,000 between the number of signatures and the number of people who voted. There are many issues that clearly demonstrate substantial grounds for declaring the elections invalid and ordering a repeat vote across Armenia," the attorney said.

Under procedural decisions of the Constitutional Court, judges Artak Zeynalyan and Vladimir Vardanyan are not participating in the review of the case challenging the election results. The political forces that filed the petition also requested that the participation of judges Seda Safaryan and Davit Khachatouryan be examined, but the Constitutional Court decided not to consider that issue.