Documents

In Anton Shekhovtsov’s newest study, he analyzes how the presence of “foreign observers” during the “parliamentary elections” in the so-called “Republic of South Ossetia” and of the “presidential elections” in the so-called “Republic of Abkhazia” in 2019 was underpinned not by the actual need to observe the “elections”, but rather by the intent to mimic legitimate international election monitoring in order to create an impression that South Ossetia and Abkhazia were legitimate independent states. 

ISFED released its latest social media monitoring report which focuses on Facebook pages that spread specific value-based narratives such as nationalistic, xenophobic, islamophobic, homophobic, illiberal, and openly anti-western messages. Narratives and propaganda methods used by these Facebook pages are identical to those used by Kremlin across Europe.

The official turnout for early voting is reported at 35.77%, which is the record high for the parliamentary elections since 2008. Official turnout figures were much greater than those reported by the observers. Participation in early voting was encouraged by the authorities. Administrations of government-owned enterprises and institutions, as well as universities strongly advised voters to participate in early voting, maintained records of early voters and reported on the progress of early voting to local executive authorities. In some cases early voting was characterized by coercion, under threats of reprisals for refusing to vote early.

In March 2019, the Parliamentary factions started a dialogue on the priorities of the electoral reforms and established a timeline that included changes to various laws. HCAV have summarized what the expected amendments will be in this new policy alert. They furthermore call on the EU to strongly denounce the attacks against genuine civil society, including HCAV, in light of the growing discrediting campaigns against reputable organizations and donors.

There are continued cases in the run up to the Parliamentary elections of candidates' registrations being revoked over alleged violations of Art. 47 and ongoing cases of bans on broadcasting the campaign speeches of opposition candidates; the DECs and the public media have demonstrated an extremely loose treatment of restrictions on campaigning activities, as established by Art. 47 of the Electoral Code, which in most cases constitutes censorship and unacceptable restrictions on freedom of expression.

The Electoral Code does not contain general or special rules regarding the conduct of the second round of local elections, except for the CEC's responsibility to ensure the conduct of the second round and the conditions for the conduct of the second round. Promo-LEX has observed that there are cases of suspicious artificial migration of voters on voter lists, a significant decrease of campaign activities ahead of the second round of elections.

The observation mission on Election Day reported that in general the opening of polling stations (PS) went smoothly on E-day. 407 incidents have been analysed by Promo-LEX, most frequently reported incidents, but not significantly numerous, were: deficiencies in voters’ lists, unjustified presence of unauthorized persons in or around the PS, presence of advertising materials within 100 m of the PS, interrupted filming during the opening of the PS and vote counting process. In general the parallel vote count did not find major discrepancies to the data provided by the CEC and the share of erroneous protocols completed by precinct election bureaus has decreased compared to the Parliamentary elections of February 24, 2019.