The oppositional powers say that the upcoming parliamentary elections are going to be violated, indeed the authorities assure that this time the elections will not be violated and will be fair. Please pay attention to the words “this time”. In fact, it means that they agree with the fact that the previous elections were violated despite the fact that following those elections they said that the elections had been democratic. However, it is not so important.
It seems that everyone in Armenia wants to have democratic elections, but always some “bad” powers are appearing and violating elections and then disappearing without discovering themselves. If a farmer looks at the sky and thinks whether it will rain or not, it is logical since he can’t change anything. Indeed it is illogical when political powers make predictions whether “the elections will be violated or not”. People can’t stop the rain, but they can stop violations.
Vazgen Sargsyan is concerned of the fact that the coordinator of the ARP central electoral headquarter is Hovik Abrahamyan and says that “he is the biggest violator”. It is not surprising since when appointing people they do their best to elect the most professional specialists; soccer trainers are professional in their sports, this person is professional in his occupation. In a word, the ARP has made a good choice. This does not mean yet that only the ARP will try to violate the elections. Everyone that has an opportunity will try to make violations and their success will depend on who their “trainers” are.
Maybe they are really going to organize fair and democratic elections and maybe the opposition is trying to undermine their fair intentions. Maybe the authorities are really interested in democratic elections and “there may be only small violations”. The authorities are discussing this version more and say that there are small violations everywhere, i.e. they are preparing people to be ready for small violations, which can’t influence on the outcome…
Now let’s try to understand the situation. There are several thousand polling stations in Armenia. Now let’s try to imagine that there is only one violator in each polling station and the other ones are very honest people. Can this one person influence on the outcome of the elections at the polling station? No, it is impossible and there should be at least 3-4 violators in each polling station, i.e. about 10.000 people must be involved in this work. Now let’s imagine that there are 3-4 violators in each polling station, but the monitors and police officers are honest people… No, it is again impossible to change the outcome without any external support. It means that at least 20.000 people must be involved in this work.
Now let’s discuss the issue in the framework of national security. When a small group of people is gathering anywhere in the country to discuss a criminal plan (for instance, targeted to undermining national security), the police takes all the necessary actions at once, but they don’t know anything about violations planned by 20.000 people (electoral violations are supposed to be crime too).
Does it mean that the mentioned 20.000 people are disorganized? No, hardly it is possible. It is impossible to do such huge work without any centralized organized institution. Thus, it means that this group is an organized criminal group, i.e. there is hierarchy in it, distribution of financial resources and labor.
Now let’s imagine that this criminal group does not exist and the elections are really democratic “with some small violations”. If the international monitors see those small violations, it means that there are too many such small violations (for instance about 100 small violations in the country). Let’s imagine that 10 votes have been violated in each of the mentioned 100 polling stations. The influence will not be significant, but they will report that there have been 100 cases of electoral violations. The official statistics reads that in Armenia 60% of crimes are discovered, thus 60 violators out of those 100 should be punished. How many violators have been punished generally in Armenia so far? No one has been punished. In a word, it means that electoral violations are not discovered as crimes in Armenia. It is surprising since in our country even the governmental officials confess that there are “some small violations”.
Notwithstanding, it is clear that the upcoming elections will be organized better than the previous ones since they are going to use better technologies. In other words, due to evolution the power tools are replaced with computers and other technologies, which help be closer to Europe. By the way, we wander whether there is any other country in the world, where the intellectual level of electoral violation technologies is growing and in parallel with that the intellectual level of the parliament is falling. Is this only an Armenian phenomenon?