Past daily of Armenia writes as follows, in particular: The last session of the Central Electoral Commission [of Armenia] and the decision published after it have given rise to serious concerns and public outcry.

At the end of the four-hour session, the commission announced that a re-vote will not be scheduled in the three controversial [election] precincts, since the cancellation of the vote [in those precincts] allegedly did not have a significant impact on the final outcome of the [June 7 parliamentary] elections. This claim, however, contradicts the fundamental logic of the electoral process and the recorded facts.

The question arises: what other scale of violation of the law or electoral fraud must be recorded, and what other process must take place for the commission to finally consider it a distortion of the election results and a “significant impact?”

When, due to just one arbitrary decision of the commission, one of the four main factions of the future parliament is directly expelled from the highest political podium, it is impossible to imagine a more influential and decisive consequence. It is precisely because of the cancellation of the results of these precincts that the votes received by the PAP [i.e. the Prosperous Armenia Party] dropped from 4.04% to 3.99%.

By a small difference of hundredths of a percentage point, the party appeared below the electoral threshold, as a result of which the votes of more than 58,000 citizens were effectively zeroed, and these citizens were deprived of legal parliamentary representation. As a result, an entire parliamentary faction was expelled from parliament. All this is happening amid [the fact that] the administrative court had already recorded the need for a re-vote, which indicates the legal vulnerability of the process.

It is no coincidence that various political forces, figures, lawyers assess all this as [parliamentary] mandate theft. Such legal blindness and the undermining of trust in [Armenia’s] electoral institutions is, in fact, an anti-state process that cannot remain without consequences. By depriving the opposition segment of society of the opportunity to be heard in a politically legal way on the parliamentary platform, the [incumbent Armenian] authorities close the institutional doors of political dialogue.

When a citizen loses faith in the power of his own vote, the struggle objectively moves outside the legal field and can lead to a large-scale street struggle. By trying to artificially form a parliament that meets its own political expediency, the ruling system is planting a slow-acting bomb under its own foundations, since the accumulated public discontent will ultimately cause the disruption of stability and the mobilization of broad opposition masses on the streets.