Voting on Behalf of Others: What Voter Lists Reveal

The quietest way to add votes is not to stuff a box but to change who is on the list. Voter-list numbers, compared over time, show it.

By Lyudvig Khachatryan · November 11, 2026

Not every falsification happens in the ballot box. If the same loyal voters are registered at several polling stations, especially in cities, they can vote more than once, and every box will still look clean. If voters are quietly removed from lists in areas where the opposition is strong, the opposition loses votes without a single extra ballot.

Why small numbers per station add up

A few dozen extra names per polling station look harmless. But with about two thousand stations, they add tens or even hundreds of thousands of voters nationwide, 3% or more of the total. That is enough to decide many elections.

The 2003 example: two rounds, two weeks apart

In the 2003 presidential election in Armenia, the voter lists changed sharply in the short time between the two rounds, according to the Central Electoral Commission's own website:

A net change of 16,000 hides a movement of more than 440,000 entries in two weeks. People do not move house on that scale between two rounds of an election. The book concludes that this gives grounds to believe voting on behalf of others was organized.

Other signs

• Turnout above 100%. In earlier elections many polling stations reported more participants than registered voters.
• Absent voters who "voted". If lists include people who live elsewhere or abroad, someone can sign for them.
• Buses between stations. Groups driven from one polling station to another on election day.
• More voters than population. In some communities the number of voters on the lists was very high compared with the population. The book's rule: the voters of a precinct cannot exceed its population, and participants cannot exceed the voters actually present.

The fix: open lists before and after voting

Voter lists can be checked only if the lists of every polling station, before and after voting, are open to anyone who wants to check them, and if the signed lists are published. Armenia's 2016 Electoral Code moved in this direction: lists are posted on police.am before the vote, and signed lists are scanned and published after it.

The monitoring on this site uses those lists: you can search voters by name, date of birth and address across 2013–2021, and see voters with no address, no birth date, or the same name and birth date at different stations.