Armenia 2005 Constitutional Referendum: What 653 Protocols Show

At station 12/5 in Yerevan the commission recorded an inaccuracy of 4.08, a fraction of a ballot. At 50 stations the boxes held 8,411 more ballots than voters had signed for.

By Lyudvig Khachatryan · November 11, 2026

The constitutional amendments of 2005 were adopted by referendum. Their legitimacy was doubted by international organisations and, as to turnout, even by the authorities; the opposition, which had called a boycott, was blamed for helping the fraud. Article 113 of the Constitution required YES from more than half of the participants and from at least one third of the registered voters.

The official totals

• Voters: 2,317,462; ballots given to precincts: 2,364,469; cancelled: 849,466.
• Participants by signatures: 1,514,307; stubs of used ballots: 1,514,545; ballots in the box: 1,514,093.
• YES: 1,411,711; NO: 82,018; invalid: 20,364; official inaccuracy: 1,582.

On these figures turnout was 65.3% and YES equalled 60.9% of all voters, almost twice the required third.

How to read this chart

The author analysed the protocols of 653 stations. Each bar is a different kind of disagreement between their numbers, compared with the inaccuracy officially recorded for the whole country.

What it shows

• At 47 of the 653 stations the recorded inaccuracies add up to 2,219.08, a fractional number, because station 12/5 in Yerevan recorded 4.08.
• Real mismatches in 190 protocols: 65,915.
• At 50 stations the ballots in the box exceed the signatures by 8,411, officially recorded stuffing; at 28/19 by 1,000, at 9/21 by 1,057, at 6/18 by 750, at 21/41 by 748.
• Mismatches involving the numbers of ballot stubs: 195,968 in 422 protocols.

The official inaccuracy, 1,582, is a fraction of what the protocols of only a third of the stations contain.

Among the same 653 stations, 107 recorded turnout below 50%, and 25 recorded YES below one third of the voters. At 6/13 the number of voters was left blank; at 6/18 the signatures and several other required numbers.

The 2015 referendum, analysed with the site’s full station data, is in 2015 YES and NO by turnout and 2015 protocol mismatches.

Source: “The Electoral Rights and Falsifications of Elections” (2010, in Armenian), the earlier Armenian book by the same author, which analyses the officially published figures of each election. The figures here are taken from it; page numbers refer to the PDF.