{"id":254378,"date":"2014-06-09T14:00:27","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T10:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=254378"},"modified":"2014-06-09T14:00:54","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T10:00:54","slug":"peaceful-mayoral-election-in-goris-but-possible-attempt-at-carousel-voting-observer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2014\/06\/09\/peaceful-mayoral-election-in-goris-but-possible-attempt-at-carousel-voting-observer.html","title":{"rendered":"Peaceful Mayoral Election in Goris, But Possible Attempt at Carousel Voting: Observer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\t<span style=\"line-height: 1.6em;\">There were a small number of violations recorded at polling stations during the June 8 mayoral election in the southern Armenian city of Goris. Everything happened outside, where the two candidates&#39; &quot;people&quot; supervised the election process and guided citizens. This was conveyed to Epress.am by Transparency International Anti-Corruption Center elections observer Babken Der-Grigorian, who was stationed at one of the polling stations.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAccording to him, the most he could do was oblige police officers not to permit these people to stand and act less than 50 meters from the polling station.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAccording to official data, winning the election was former Syunik regional governor (marzpet) Surik Khachatryan&#39;s prot&eacute;g&eacute;, Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) candidate Vachagan Adunts, who gathered 4,743 of the votes. His opponent, Hrayr Yolyan (no party affiliation), gathered 2,959 of the votes, while 510 ballots (almost 7%) were declared invalid.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAccording to Der-Grigorian, those providing &quot;guidance&quot; to voters weren&#39;t only supporters of the HHK candidate &mdash; Yolyan&#39;s supporters also attempted to secure victory this way.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tOf the violations inside the polling station, the observer isolated the incident of finding <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/TIArmenia\/photos\/a.118534384888647.22529.112902655451820\/650069881735092\/?type=1&amp;theater\"><span style=\"color:#0000CD;\"><strong>3 envelopes containing 2 ballots<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, which, according to him, may indicate an attempt to organize <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Carousel_voting\"><span style=\"color:#0000CD;\"><strong>carousel&nbsp;voting<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\t&quot;On the whole, the elections were held peacefully, since the opposition candidate&#39;s name was not on the ballot,&quot; he said.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tRecall, two of the four registered candidates <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/en\/2014\/06\/07\/goris-elections-how-degree-of-pressure-on-citizens-changed.html\"><span style=\"color:#0000CD;\"><strong>recused themselves<\/strong><\/span><\/a> on the last day of the campaign.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There were a small number of violations recorded at polling stations during the June 8 mayoral election in the southern Armenian city of Goris<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[56052,14812,56036,56051,56038,17743,55340],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}