International observers say Georgian elections marred by “climate of pressure”

With almost all the ballots tallied, Georgia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) says the incumbent Georgian Dream party captured 54 percent of the vote in the October 26 parliamentary elections. Opposition parties are refusing to accept the outcome, citing observer assessments and exit polls that show they did considerably better than the official tally indicates.

At a news conference on October 27, international election observers stopped short of saying that the elections were stolen, as opponents of the ruling Georgian Dream party allege, but they substantiated claims of a “widespread climate of pressure” on voters during and leading up to the elections.

“We express our concerns about the electoral conditions, in particular the uneven playing field which undermines trust in the outcome and explains the reactions to the election results. These issues need to be addressed by [Georgian Dream] authorities,” said a statement issued by the international monitoring mission.

The findings further muddy a political situation in which both the ruling Georgian Dream party and the collective opposition are claiming a right to form the next government.

Over the course of election day on October 26, reports of violations poured in. A video circulated on social media purported to show a man stuffing ballots into a box in the southern Georgian region of Kvemo Kartli, while an opposition-aligned election observer was beaten at another polling station in the same municipality. The CEC later declared votes cast at the polling station in the first instance invalid. 

Speaking to Eurasianet prior to the elections, International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy Deputy Director Levan Natroshvili said that there was a high risk of electoral irregularities in some largely rural regions, including Kvemo Kartli. “These regions are more vulnerable to intimidation, pressure, and all kinds of leverage that are used by the government,” he said.

In response to a question from Eurasianet about whether electoral violations were concentrated in specific regions, the head of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights election observation mission, Eoghan Murphy, said after the press conference that “[the] issues that we saw on election day were spread fairly evenly across the country.”

The Georgian Young Lawyers Association, which also organized a comprehensive monitoring initiative, said that it had counted 300 irregularities by the time voting ended. In a statement, the “My Vote” election monitoring coalition of NGOs said that “serious and substantial violations” had taken place, which were part of “a larger scheme, the purpose of which was to subvert the final result of the election.”

The international mission also noted irregularities on election day.

“We experienced two different worlds: one inside polling stations, where the voting process was, in general, well administered, and one outside the polling stations,” said Iulian Bulai, head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s monitoring delegation, at the news conference.

“The presence of cameras of the ruling party in the polling stations, and people in front of polling stations tracking and possibly controlling voters, led [to a] widespread climate of pressure and party-organized intimidation and the feeling [that] ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ as one of our observers depicted it,” Bulai added

If the current results hold, the outcome would deprive Georgian Dream of sufficient representation in parliament to amend the constitution on its own. During the election campaign, Georgian Dream leaders had vowed to ban opposition parties and prosecute their political opponents. 

Exit polls released in the evening of October 26 painted an initially conflicting picture of the results: in two polls commissioned by opposition-aligned TV stations, Georgian Dream led all parties with 40 percent of the ballots cast. Those same polls show opposition parties garnered a sufficient percentage of ballots cast to form a coalition government. Meanwhile, a poll commissioned by Imedi TV, widely believed to be aligned with the government, gave Georgian Dream 56 percent of the vote.

Both sides claimed victory. But as more votes were counted over the course of the evening, it became apparent that Georgian Dream was on track for a clear majority, which the CEC confirmed around 10 pm on October 26.

Opposition leaders said they were refusing to acknowledge the CEC numbers. “We do not accept stolen election results and we are not going to recognize these stolen results,” said United National Movement party chair Tina Bokuchava.

Source:Eurasianet