Armenia 2012: Charchakis and Aygestan, Turnout That Went Down and Up Again
In Aygestan the count fell by 170 in the afternoon, then rose by 717 in the last three hours. In Charchakis the final count was lower than at 17:00.
Original page on electionscount.info: “Negative” participation, 2012On 6 May 2012 the official turnout of these polling stations went down between two reports, which cannot happen in a real count: each report includes everyone who voted since 8:00. The monitoring site drew a chart for each such station from the turnout published by elections.am. They are among the 20 stations with "negative" participation in 2012.
How to read these charts
The chart has three panels, all for the same polling station and the same four reporting times (11:00, 14:00, 17:00, 20:00):
- Left: the average number of seconds one voter spent at the station in each 3-hour window (10,800 seconds divided by the voters in that window). Low = fast; 0 = the count went down.
- Middle: how many people voted in each 3-hour window. A triangle below the red line is a negative number, an impossible decrease.
- Right: the cumulative turnout reported at each hour (blue) against the number of registered voters (purple line). Red labels mark the reports that broke the rules.
Station 14/56, Charchakis
Community secondary school, 10th Street, building 13. Registered voters: 486.
How to read this chart
Left: seconds per voter in each 3-hour window. Middle: voters in each window (below the red line = a decrease). Right: reported turnout (blue) against the 486 registered voters (purple).
What it shows
A small station with 486 voters. Turnout grew normally through the day to 299 at 17:00, but the final count was 281, 18 fewer than had already voted three hours earlier.
| Window | Reported turnout at the end | Voters in the window | Seconds per voter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00–11:00 | 72 | 72 | 150.0 |
| 11:00–14:00 | 220 | 148 | 73.0 |
| 14:00–17:00 | 299 | 79 | 136.7 |
| 17:00–20:00 | 281 | -18 | — |
Station 17/15, Aygestan
Aygestan House of Culture. Registered voters: 1,233.
How to read this chart
Left: seconds per voter in each 3-hour window. Middle: voters in each window (below the red line = a decrease). Right: reported turnout (blue) against the 1,233 registered voters (purple).
What it shows
The count fell from 550 at 14:00 to 380 at 17:00, 170 fewer, then rose by 717 in the last three hours, one voter every 15.1 seconds, to 1,097.
| Window | Reported turnout at the end | Voters in the window | Seconds per voter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00–11:00 | 230 | 230 | 47.0 |
| 11:00–14:00 | 550 | 320 | 33.8 |
| 14:00–17:00 | 380 | -170 | — |
| 17:00–20:00 | 1,097 | 717 | 15.1 |
Why it matters
A report that falls means that at least one of the station's official numbers is false: either voters were announced who had not come, or the final protocol was cut back. When the fall is followed by hundreds of votes at a speed of 10–20 seconds per voter, or when a report exceeds the number of registered voters, the numbers point to signatures and ballots added on paper. See polling station capacity and the method of comparing election numbers.
Data and sources on this site
From the book
This article is based on Chapters IV and VI of Electoral Rights and Election Falsification by Lyudvig Khachatryan, which explains the full method, the formulas and the cases behind it.