a1plus.am covered Transparency International Anticorruption Center’s (TIAC) press conference that took place on July 7, 2017 in “Media Center.” During the press conference Varuzhan Hoktanyan, TIAC Project Director touched, among other topics, on the misuse of administrative resources on election day, presenting the results of TIAC's project “Electronic Monitoring of 2017 Parliamentary Elections” funded by Open Society Foundations - Armenia.

TIAC’s project established the duration of an individual’s voting process: 50 seconds at its fastest. However, the research showed that 181 polling stations have registered a voting speed that exceeded those 50 seconds – a time frame during which it would be physically impossible for an individual to cast a vote.

According to Hoktanyan since the launch of the pre-election campaign TIAC has recorded numerous cases of misuse of administrative resources, mainly by the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (HHK).

“In other countries, administrative resources are misused before the election day. In Armenia misuse of administrative resources occurs on the election day, as well. It turns out that the voter lists have not been cleared out, which implies that the voter lists were inflated due to fake voters.”

Varuzhan Hoktanyan noted: “If there weren’t so many inaccuracies and cases of vote buying, the Republican Party would not have held the stable majority, and many votes would have gone to other political parties.”

Hoktanyan is assured that the current state of the elections is a testimony to a weak political opposition. “If the voting process were strictly overseen by the political parties, there would be little fraud.”