Election Day: End-Of-Day Reactions to Yerevan Elections

Ched Flego, IFES, Director

On the positive side, we saw an improvement over previous elections in some of the procedures, and the polling place layout in many places worked well, particularly where the chairman of the PEC controlled the number of people in polling places. There seemed to be an improvement in the voting lists, too.

But there were still polling places where there was a lack of control, where there was a lot of confusion, and there was anger and shouting between the observers and PEC commission members. In one case we witnessed something close to a brawl at 5/13. The vote showed that though people are no longer voting for a community head, those old local oligarch loyalties predominate. They provided transport and their strategy must have been to organize many voters early, because in several districts we saw higher-than-normal turnouts.

Samvel Matirosyan, blogger/new media consultant

Yerevan City council elections reported interesting changes in the  Armenian internet information sphere. Despite the fact that the number of internet users has been growing in the last year and the number of visitors to Armenian on-line media has also increased, there was less online interest shown on this election. If during the last presidential elections, on-line media mostly did not work because of the overloading of the servers, today we encountered more passivity. Major on-line media show 10-25 % increase in visits as compared with the week. It means, we usually see such increase on Mondays after Saturday/Sunday, when nothing unusual happens in the city. The only exception today is A1plus that is showing 50 % increase and separately implemented A1plus Elections 2009 project. However, even in this case the number of visitors was unusually low. The same can be said about blogs and forums, where elections have been less discussed and reported on than in former times.

However, this time wide usage of new technologies and new media has been recorded. For example, hundreds of reports on elections have been recorded using Twitter.com. The same can be said about social networking sites, particularly facebook.com, where lots of notes have been taken on this issue. This time new media has showed that they can be more dynamic than traditional on-line media.

Artak Kirakosyan, Civil Society Institute/ARA (ran voter hotline), Vice-President
This year the elections are the same there is no specific difference. But the main thing is that people have been really active this year during local elections, which is a very good sign. There was an opinion before the elections that there would be new types of violations, but actually it’s the same handwriting. Check out our website for violation. After 6 p.m., our hotline got a lot more active and we had many more calls.

Gegham Vartanyan, Internews, E-Channel Editor
This year was not such a big difference from the last elections, according to our reporters in the field. But this time there was many more voters, and they are active and they went to vote but they were not interested.  At one station, there was a photo of Serge Sargsyan on the ballot box.  There were lots of violations, but not as much as during the presidential election of 2008.

Bob Evans, IREX/Core Media Support Program, Director
At the close of yet another election day, it’s strange to be less-than-excited about courageous journalists again putting themselves in harms way to report on well orchestrated, and seeminglyoutrageous, elections violations. The energy and electricity generated by the government’s revving up for this and other elections seems to come at a terrible cost to the average citizen. While some resist and take to the streets every Friday the clamor of the powerful machine all but drowns out their calls for change. I can’t help but wonder if somehow we are actually bolstering the status quo by telling tales of elections abuse over and over again knowing that we will never be able to report that the perpetrators have paid a penalty or were even rebuked. Is our reporting actually demonstrating that these are in fact all powerful forces that operate with impunity?  It seems that the turbines of government are whining away generating street repairs, garbage collection, and, unfortunately, even more power as we watch another flawed election play out and wait for them to tell us who they have appointed  mayor.

Kregg Halstead, ABA ROLI, Director
The basic electoral framework upon which the Yerevan city council elections were organized and held cast their integrity into doubt.  Rather than having a direct election for Mayor of Yerevan with a run off if no candidate received 50% plus one, an amendment was made to the election law two months prior to the city council elections.  This amendment provided that any political party receiving 40% or more of the city council vote automatically receives a 10% “bonus” vote percentage to per se make the new mayor a representative of this party.  This framework dilutes the ability of the voters to make a direct choice on who becomes the new mayor.  Such choice had already been diminished by the indirect nature of the elections themselves.  This type of framework seems to indicate that the organizers had a specific result in mind for which they wanted to avoid, specifically, 60% or more of the voters and the political parties through which they are represented ultimately rallying around a compromise type mayoral candidate, who could unite various factions when the new city council members will elect the mayor. 

-With reporting by Ani Matevosyan/caucasusreports.com/IREX CMSPA