Lawyer seeks mandate redistribution ruling

PanARMENIAN.Net - Aram Orbelyan, a lawyer representing the Prosperous Armenia Party (PPA), said during his closing arguments before Armenia's Constitutional Court that the evidence warrants, at a minimum, a decision to redistribute parliamentary mandates in the case challenging the parliamentary election results.

"The available evidence supports the conclusion that, if the court does not invalidate the election results in their entirety, it should at least invalidate them to the extent necessary to order a redistribution of mandates," he said, according to Panorama.am.

Orbelyan argued that the issue was not an incorrect count of the votes received by Prosperous Armenia, but rather an error in transferring the data into the relevant table.

"This is a fundamental issue. It is one thing if votes are counted incorrectly at a polling station, in which case the remedy is a recount. It is quite another when the votes are counted correctly, the protocol is properly completed, but the Central Electoral Commission fails to enter those figures correctly. What happens then? The figures are corrected in the computer, and at that point the Central Electoral Commission already knows that Prosperous Armenia has passed the electoral threshold," he said.

On June 26, Armenia's Constitutional Court began hearings in the consolidated case based on petitions filed by seven political forces challenging the results of the June 7 parliamentary elections. The proceedings are ongoing.