Garegin Azarian, Chairman, Central Election Commission (CEC), Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia for EurasiaNet 2007

A morning call from Tsovinar Khachatrian, Press Secretary of the Central Election Commission (CEC) of the Republic of Armenia, alerted me to the fact that 5,000 new ballot boxes would be arriving from Syria at 11 am. The boxes were transparent, just as they were during the 2003 presidential election. Back then, the OSCE were responsible for getting agreement of the CEC to use them in Armenia.

“It’s our small contribution to the transparency of the elections. Let you have it,” the British head of the OSCE office in Yerevan, Roy Reeve, told the CEC’s deputy chairman, Hamlet Abrahamian.

Reeve and other Western diplomats declined to reveal the cost of the ballot boxes, saying that it is not significant.

The CEC agreed to install transparent ballot boxes last week at the urging of the OSCE’s monitoring mission which views them as an additional safeguard against fraud. Representatives of the opposition presidential candidates welcomed the move.

I’m not sure what happened to the old boxes, but two national and one local election as well as referendum later, perhaps they eventually succumb to wear and tear. Still, as many people joked back then, even if the election doesn’t turn out to be transparent, at least the ballot boxes definitely will be. Indeed, this time round even the lids will be transparent, unlike in 2003 when the covers were solid.

Regardless, at the CEC press conference yesterday, its Chairman maintains that the election is progressing smoothly and in accordance with the electoral code.

The chairman of Armenia’s Central Election Commission (CEC), Garegin Azarian, insisted on Wednesday that it is doing a good job of ensuring a level playing field and making other preparations for next month’s parliamentary elections.

Azarian said that the CEC, dominated by President Robert Kocharian’s political allies, has so far received only ten formal complaints from political parties and individual candidates vying for the 131 seats in the National Assembly.

“Although it’s a bit difficult for me to evaluate our work, I would call it slightly more than satisfactory,” he told a news conference. “I have a stricter approach than you. But ten complaints are OK.”

[…]

“We have never had such transparent voter lists before,” said the former Justice Ministry official. “So let us check them and report all inaccuracies to the police.”

Still, Azarian admitted that the registry may still contain the names of dead people, something which has been a major source of electoral fraud. “If anybody says that there is a voter registry in the world that does not include a single dead person I will immediately resign,” he said.

According to RFE/RL’s Press Review, however, the opposition print media is not so convinced. Indeed, some newspapers are particularly critical of Azarian and says that he is no better than his predecessors. They appear to imply that time will tell if he is actually worse, but feel that he will at least turn out to be more sophisticated.

“Zhamanak Yerevan” says the current chairman of the Central Election Commission, Garegin Azarian, and his two predecessors, Artak Sahradian and Khachatur Bezirjian, will go down in history as individuals who “played a decisive role in the fate of independent Armenia, having destroyed a budding electoral system, impeded the entry of democratic values into Armenia, and stunted the country’s development.” The paper says they refused to obey illegal orders from the country’s leaders, fearing the latter more than “the prospect of being denounced by future generations.”

“There is one step from Azarian to Sahradian,” reads a headline in “Haykakan Zhamanak.” “Azarian is slowly but steadily becoming a worthy successor of the previous CEC chairman, Artak Sahradian,” writes the paper. “Sahradian earned notoriety for the fact that in order to conceal violations committed during pre-election and post-election processes he had to periodically give ludicrous explanations. In short, we have a brand new Sahradian who speaks fast and can use a computer.”

Anyway, more work to finish, and a few more posts to make so this one is going to be brief. However, I expect to be a regular visitor at the CEC in the coming weeks so I’m sure there will be much more to report at a later date.

Central Election Commission (CEC), Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia for EurasiaNet 2007

Garegin Azarian, Chairman, Central Election Commission (CEC), Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia for EurasiaNet 2007