The Zhoghovurd newspaper of Armenia writes as follows: The second round of voting for the approval of the electoral list of the Civil Contract [(CC)] party ahead of the regular [parliamentary] elections in [June] 2026 passed with interesting arithmetic nuances.

According to the Zhoghovurd daily’s information, 988 delegates out of the 1,080 delegates participated in the voting held on Saturday and Sunday. As a result, [PM] Nikol Pashinyan received 933 votes, the highest result.

The numbers, however, also have their own “interline” story: 55 of the 988 participating delegates actually did not “see” Pashinyan in the status of a candidate for prime minister, or simply could not correctly decide in the ballot composed of CC faces.

The Zhoghovurd daily learned that about three dozen CC members wrote other names on the ballots instead of the name of the prime minister candidate—for example, [defense minister] Suren Papikyan, [foreign minister] Ararat Mirzoyan, [Yerevan mayor] Tigran Avinyan, and others.

Thus, if we calculate with cold arithmetic, Pashinyan received 933 votes out of 988 participants, which is about 94.4%. And the remaining 5.6% either creatively approached the voting, or tried to remind that even in internal elections, competition sometimes appears where it is not officially envisaged.

In fact, the issue of the prime minister candidate within the CC, according to the numbers, has been largely resolved, but thanks to the “free creators” of the ballots, the topic has acquired a different sublayer: to what extent is the idea of a single candidate comparable with pluralism, at least within the [CC] party?