Electronic monitoring of voting numbers at the 2012-2018 elections in Armenia were aimed at preventing possible fraud and violations and, by that, help to restore the trust of the society to the institute of elections. Its objectives were to control the accuracy of the process and results of voting in all precincts, analyze possible instances of irregularities and fraud during voting and assess the impact of fraud and irregularities on the outcome of the referendum. The project, supported by Open Society Foundations – Armenia, was implemented by Transparency International Anti-corruption Center (TIAC) NGO, which is the official chapter of Transparency International worldwide anti-corruption movement in Armenia.
This method of electronic monitoring of voting numbers has been already applied by TIAC during the 2012 and 2017 National Assembly, 2013 presidential, 2013 Yerevan Council elections and 2015 constitutional referendum. The method, which is based on the comparison of certain, related to each other
voting numbers
, is described in detail in the “Voting rights and electoral falsifications” (ISBN-978-9939-53-733-7) book (in Armenian), published in 2010 in Yerevan.
The basic assumption, on which the concept of the method is based, is that if the electoral procedures have been conducted properly, then the mathematical relationships between those numbers shall have certain (“correct”) values or range of values.
If the voting procedures have been carried out in a proper manner, then the mathematical relationships between the voting numbers should be equal to certain values. If those values are different, then one could have serious and legitimate concerns that there could be serious risks on occurrence of irregularities and, even, fraud that took place in the electoral processes.
The findings of the method could be very important additional proof for the findings revealed by the observation of the electoral processes before the Election Day, as well as on that day in the polling stations, including the vote counting and summarization of the results in the precincts.
Lyudvig Khachatryan, author of the method, is the head of the monitoring group in this project. The same group also carried out electronic monitoring at all mentioned above elections and constitutional referendum. The results of those monitoring efforts are currently available at TIAC website (see http://elections.transparency.am/).
Project Director: Varuzhan Hoktanyan
Lyudvig Khachatryan - Election expert/analyst,
Gayane Margaryan – Full Stack Web developer/MySQL Database Administrator,
Armine Martirosyan – PHP Programmer,
Lusine Topchyan - Operator (translator),
Luiza Topchyan - Operator,
Anahit Shamamyan - Operator.