How to Check an Election with Its Own Numbers: The Method of Comparing Election Numbers

An honest polling station leaves behind a set of numbers that must agree with each other. When they do not, something happened that the law does not allow.

By Lyudvig Khachatryan · November 11, 2026

On election day every polling station produces many numbers: registered voters, ballots received, signatures on the voter list, envelopes and ballots in the ballot box, valid and invalid ballots, and votes for each party or candidate. Most observers look only at the last one, the votes. The method of comparing election numbers, set out by Lyudvig Khachatryan, who worked in Armenia's Central Electoral Commission from 1990 to 1996, looks at all of them together.

The idea is simple. If voting and counting follow the law, these numbers are tied to each other by fixed rules. A voter who signs the list receives one ballot and one envelope and drops the envelope into the box. So the count of signatures, envelopes and ballots must be the same. If they differ, either the commission recorded why, or the law was broken.

The basic rules every polling station must pass

The book lists more than twenty such rules. These are the ones anyone can check with the protocol of a single polling station:

The last rule is the least known and often the most telling: a polling station can register only so many people an hour. We explain it in a separate article on polling station capacity.

Why a "small technical error" matters

Mismatches are often dismissed as technical mistakes that do not change the result. The book argues the opposite. If a voter really did leave with a ballot, the commission must record it, and the record explains the difference. If there is no record, the commission itself broke the procedure, or worse. As the book puts it:

Discrepancies in election figures indicate election falsification.

What matters is not only whether mismatches exist, but how big they are compared with the margin that decides the result. The method calculates the smallest number of doubtful ballots that could change the distribution of mandates. If the total of mismatches across all polling stations is larger than that number, the official result is no longer a calculation but a decision.

How Armenian law later used the idea

The Electoral Code of Armenia adopted in 2016 (Article 72) introduced official "inaccuracies" based on the same logic:

• First inaccuracy: the difference between the stamps given to the station and the sum of voting coupons received from voters plus unused stamps.
• Second inaccuracy: how much the valid and invalid ballots in the box exceed the number of participants (0 if they do not).

The sum is the station's inaccuracy, and under Article 95 the 5% and 7% thresholds for parties and alliances are counted from the votes plus the inaccuracies. In other words, doubtful ballots are no longer ignored when deciding who enters parliament.

What the numbers showed in Armenia

Applied to the 2012 proportional elections to the National Assembly, the monitoring on this site found (see the full 2012 analysis):

In the 2015 constitutional referendum, electoral numbers did not match at 614 polling stations with 931,092 registered voters. That is the subject of a separate analysis of the 2015 referendum.

Check it yourself

The method needs no special access, only the protocols published by the electoral commission. The monitoring pages on this site put the numbers of every polling station side by side, so the mismatches are visible at once.