Epress.am News from Armenia
On Jun. 18, 2009, then US Charge d’Affaires in Yerevan Joseph Pennington sent an unclassified cable to the US State Department, analyzing the results of the May 31 mayoral election in the Armenian capital. Pennington notes that the election displays a “curious pattern”:
“Voter turnout was highest in the Territorial Electoral Commissions (TECs) most ridden with allegations of fraud. This is most apparent in the results of TECs 7 and 8, which comprise the troubled district of Malatia-Sebastia… and parts of the adjacent Shengavit and Ajapnyak districts, [where] over 40 of their combined 66 precincts recorded voter turnout of over 60 percent, compared to an overall average turnout of 53.5 percent.”
In the cable released by WikiLeaks late last month, Pennington states that the Armenian National Congress results show that this opposition bloc performed best where voter turnout was lowest, “most likely because these TECs were not the main targets of ballot stuffing and other forms of electoral fraud.”
“In the end, however, we will never know how many votes the RPA [the Republican Party of Armenia] won legitimately, and how many were fraudulent. We nevertheless find it hard to believe that RPA won fair and square the forty percent of votes it needed to gain a majority in the city council, and more importantly, the right to elevate its top candidate to the post of mayor. We also find it hard to believe that the ANC won only five precincts in the recent election, down from the 80-plus it won in the 2008 presidential election,” concludes the US diplomat.