Chairman of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) of Armenia, Vahagn Hovakimyan, explained at Monday’s press conference why the CEC was starting with a 35-minute delay its press conference on summing up the results of Sunday’s National Assembly (parliament) election.

Hovakimyan noted: “You have all seen the numbers published on our website and, in fact, they do not include the results of online voting. Moreover, the percentage calculation that the website system makes is rounded to the nearest hundredth. That is, when you simply add up the numbers published on our website and calculate the percentage from those absolute numbers, you will see that there is a certain difference at the thousandths level. This is in the case when those numbers do not include the results of online voting, which I will read now.

The results of the preliminary protocol will already be understandable to you when I present the numbers. In this case, we are dealing with a situation where even one vote can be decisive for a political force very close to the threshold of passing.

I would like to remind that these are preliminary results.”

Then, the CEC chairman presented the CEC protocol on the election results, which are as follows:

Number of voters on voter lists – 2,503,981

Number of voters who participated in the elections online – 410

Total number of voters – 2,507,216

Voter turnout – 1,477 736 (58.94%)

Number of invalid ballots – 17 097.

Then, CEC chairman Vahagn Hovakimyan presented the votes collected by political forces. Accordingly:

Civil Contract party – 49, 825 percent

Strong Armenia bloc – 23,281 percent

“Armenia” bloc – 9, 934 percent

Prosperous Armenia Party – 3,996 percent.

“The requirement of the electoral code [of Armenia] is that mandates are distributed to those parties, blocs of parties, which in the case of parties that received the sum of the total number of ballots voted in favor and the number of inaccuracies, 4 percent, in the case of party blocs consisting of up to three parties, 8 percent, in the case of party blocs consisting of four or more parties, 10 percent," Hovakimyan noted.

These results suggest that the Prosperous Armenia Party does not overcome the threshold of passing into parliament and only three political forces pass into the National Assembly of Armenia.