During the May 12 elections of Armenian, a minimum of 450 thousand votes were falsified. This is easily proven by simple math. The calculation is very easy and the mechanism is not new for us. How long do you think a person’s voting takes?
Before answering that question, let’s agree that the voting cycle starts at the moment the voter enters into the precinct and the end is when he or she leaves the precinct. So, the voter enters a precinct, approaches the PEC member, who is in charge of voter lists, which has hundreds and sometimes even thousands of names. The PEC member finds the voter’s name and fills in his or her passport data. Later the voter signs two times next to his or her name, after which he or she approaches the PEC member, who gives two ballots (one for majoritarian, one for proportional) and two envelopes to the voter. After receiving the ballots the voter votes at the screen secretly, folds the ballots, and inserts them in the envelopes. After that the voter approaches the PEC member, who is supposed to stamp the envelopes. After the member puts a stamp, the voter approaches the ballot box and casts the envelopes in the box. After that he or she leaves the precinct. Of course, in many cases voters don’t know or understand the voting process, or they don’t find their names in the lists and have to go to the courts, or they vote incorrectly and ask for a new ballot or are not able to vote on their own because of physical disability and have to ask for someone else’s help. And all this prolongs the time of the voter to vote in the precinct. But let’s imagine that our voters perfectly know the process of voting, they are all able to vote on their own, and have no problems at all. How long do you think an ideal voter would need to vote (entering the polling station and leaving)? Four minutes or five? Let’s imagine that our voters are all so literate and organized that two of them can vote in a precinct within three minutes. In this case, a simple count shows that a maximum 40 people can vote in a precinct within an hour. Therefore during the whole voting period only 480 voters can vote (elections take 12 hours). As there are 1,923 precincts in RA, it turns out that on May 12, a maximum of 923,040 voters could have participated in elections. This could have happened if all the voters had started their voting early in the morning, at 8:00 AM, and voted without crowding until 8 PM in the evening. But it turns out that according to the official data of the CEC, the turnout in Armenia was 1 million 390 thousand. But as you see, it’s practically impossible. This means that the CEC exaggerated the turnout by 465 thousand. It means that 465 thousand was added to the actual turnout of voters. This is what we were speaking about at the beginning of the article. It’s another issue how all that was arranged. Let us present the result of that calculation. According to the CEC result, in order to provide those numbers, at least one voter should have voted every 59 seconds in all precincts of Armenia. Moreover, such speedy voting should have been provided non-stop from 8 in the morning till 8 in the evening. The turnout of one million 390 thousand would be possible if there were 2,800 precincts instead of 1,923. As it’s impossible in our current conditions, we have grounds to suppose that about half a million people voted only spiritually, because their physical voting would be impossible. Maybe that is the reason that in Ditavan village, a few hours after the start of elections, the ballots had run out. After all this, it would be hard not to state that the elections were one step forward in the democratic development in Armenia. It was a great mechanism to falsify elections without directly influencing the free will of the voters.