Local Observers Assessment Largely Positive
It’s Your Choice, Armenia’s largest domestic election observation mission, has also announced that it largely considers Saturday’s election a vast improvement over previous ones. Again, as I mentioned in my previous post, this does not mean that there weren’t significant problems either, but the main thing is that you just can’t compare them to other votes in Armenia. RFE/RL has more.
The non-governmental organization It’s Your Choice (IYC) monitored the election campaign and deployed about 4,000 observers in most of the polling stations across the country on voting day.
“These elections were better and took place in a more civilized atmosphere than the past elections,” the IYC chairman, Harutiun Hambartsumian, told RFE/RL, presenting their preliminary findings. “Of course, there were shortcomings, violations. But there was a clear improvement.”
Hambartsumian said the Armenian authorities failed to create a level playing field for all major contenders and used their control of election commissions and other “government resources” to retain a comfortable majority in the National Assembly. He said IYC observers did not witness instances of vote buying which opposition parties claim were widespread. But he said they did see busloads of people transported to polling stations.
“There was busing of individuals to polling stations that became overcrowded, complicating the voting process,” Hambartsumian said. “Besides, our observers saw ballot stuffing attempts in a number of polling stations. There were also instances of multiple voting.”
“Since those violations were not widespread, they could not have affected election results,” he added.
Anyway, this time round, two of IYC’s observers have actually posted their impressions of the election. Although I’ve already linked to this post by Nareg at Cilicia.com’s Life in Armenia before, it’s worth linking to it again.
Well, it was awfully tiring, but I have to say I was terribly impressed, and felt proud, because, before going in as an observer, I was expecting to see the most khaydarag, utterly ridiculous things as usual, and I was even looking forward to a nice fight with the authorities, but things went so smoothly, it was so clean, so just… I mean, I’ve been hearing reports from elsewhere, and the Lord alone knows what we are to expect in the next few weeks in terms of accusations and rallies, but all I know is, I have not lost my faith in the Armenian people and democracy, as I expected I would.
Over at Life Around Me, Zarchka also posts her experiences. Incidentally, at all the polling stations I visited on election day I made a point of locating the IYC observer in every one. Apart from Noragavit where I couldn’t find the observer when I was there, all of them said there had been no problems up until the point I arrived. They were also quite calm, unlike during other elections I’ve seen them in action for.
Anyway.
Paradoxically, Nareg was observing the election for IYC as a Diasporan observer recruited by the Center for Regional Development / Transparency International (CRD-TI Armenia) yet, while both he and IYC seem to agree with the conclusion of the OSCE/ODIHR observers, CRD-TI Armenia doesn’t.
Anyway, all of the Diasporan observers I’ve spoken to so far don’t seem to agree with CRD-TI Armenia, and nor does IYC itself. Anyway, if bribes were distributed and I think they were, people took them quite gladly and willingly went to the polls to vote. As most observers say that the polling stations were calm I don’t think this argument about an “atmosphere of fear” stands up too well. Only in one polling station I visited was the situation tense.
Of course, it’s still a violation of the electoral code and also means that the percentages of the vote for the other parties are far less than they should be, but I do believe people who took the bribes wouldn’t have voted for the opposition or at all without them. Now all I can hope for is that Orinats Yerkir and Heritage become the viable opposition that any country needs for its democratization. They don’t have many seats, of course, but I hope that they can use their positions to help restore the trust of the population in the political system.
Let’s see.
Comment by Onnik — May 15, 2007 @ 2:57 pm
Comment by Onnik — May 15, 2007 @ 3:09 pm
Comment by Onnik — May 15, 2007 @ 9:35 pm