GEORGIA’S CENTRAL ELECTION commission has said it will recount ballots at some 14% of polling stations after opposition parties denounced the weekend parliamentary election as rigged.
Pro-Western opposition parties have refused to recognise the results of Saturday’s vote, which they claim was falsified in favour of the ruling Georgian Dream party. Tens of thousands joined a protest rally in Tbilisi on Monday.
“District Election Commissions (DECs) will conduct recounts of ballots from five polling stations randomly selected in each election district,” the commission said in a statement.
According to near-complete results announced by the commission, the ruling Georgian Dream party won 53.9%, compared with the 37.7% for an opposition coalition.
President Salome Zurabishvili has declared the election results “illegitimate,” alleging election interference by a “Russian special operation”, a claim that was rejected by the Kremlin.
She said that “quite sophisticated” fraudulent schemes were used in the weekend vote.
Zurabishvili said that the high level of planning of the election fraud seemed to be more than the government could have achieved to stay in power.
Opposition parties have said they would not enter the new “illegitimate” parliament and demanded “fresh” elections run by an “international election administration.”
The United States and the European Union have condemned electoral “irregularities”.
On Monday, a group of Georgia’s leading election monitors said that they had uncovered evidence of complex, large-scale fraud and demanded the annulment of at least 15% of votes cast.
Data analyst Levan Kvirkvelia said on X that “(voting) data provides solid evidence supporting the argument of ballot stuffing/miscounting.”
“This manipulation occurred exclusively in rural areas, and we can say that the ruling party committed electoral fraud,” he added.
Defying the EU’s concerns over the vote, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – current holder of the bloc’s rotating presidency and the Kremlin’s closest EU associate – arrived in Tbilisi on Monday for a two-day visit.
Georgia was rocked in May by huge demonstrations against a law on “foreign influence”, that critics said mirrored Russian legislation used to silence Kremlin critics.
The US imposed sanctions on Georgian officials following the protests, while Brussels put EU-hopeful Tbilisi’s accession process on halt.
The ruling Georgian Dream party has for months been accused by the opposition of steering Tbilisi away from its goal of joining the EU and back into Russia’s orbit.
With reporting from © AFP 2024
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