The Democratic Piece

On May 12, Armenians turned out in large numbers to vote in a new parliament in the first election in that country to be labeled as free and fair by the international observers. I was forunate enough to be a part of that observation mission, as one of nearly four hundred Short Term Observers (STOs) serving as the eyes and ears in all parts of the country for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR). It was a distinct honor to be able to participate in the international bonanza that was the OSCE/ODIHR’s Election Observation Mission in Armenia, and I relish the opportunity to serve in this capacity in the future.

My experience in Armenia differed slightly from the official characterization of the elections, which described the vote as “conducted largely in accordance with OSCE and Council of Europe commitments and other international standards for democratic elections” (view the preliminary OSCE/ODIHR report here). While the initial findings do mention some “shortcomings,” they fail to mention the unabashed and light-hearted attitude with which the Precinct Election Commission to which I was assigned blatantly committed election fraud while counting the votes and completing the results protocols.

The Armenian electoral system is similar to that used in Russia, and many other former Soviet states, in that it uses a mix of closed party lists and single member districts to elect members of parliament. Voters are given two separate ballots, one with a list of parties and one with a list of candidates in their district, and then cast them in two separate ballot boxes. Due to a new, streamlined set of procedures that make it very hard for anyone to inject fraud into this portion of the process, there were only very minor irregularities in the issuing and casting of ballots. The vote counting and results tabulation, however, is a completely different question, one which relies entirely on the integrity of the officials charged with this task. Unfortunately, the commissioners in precinct 17-38 lacked such integrity. After counting the party list ballots, they spent nearly an hour “cooking the books,” or as they explained it “reading the tabulation instructions,” before presenting a set of results that in no way reflected the actual number of votes cast for any one party. They then proceeded to throw procedure out the window and invited anyone in the vicinity to come help count the single member district ballots, despite the presence of OSCE observers. Ballots were altered, stuffed in drawers, and handled by anyone who wanted to participate in the “democratic process.”

While my experience seemed to be an exception rather than the rule, based on conversations with fellow STOs and a general debriefing session held after the election, the fact remains that the nearly 2000 registered voters in precinct 17-38, in the village of Mrgashat, had their votes annulled through the deliberate falsification of the results by the precinct commissioners. Given the, admittedly qualified, determination by OSCE/ODIHR that the Armenian election broadly met the international standards for a genuine democratic election, it seems that those Mrgashat voters were an acceptable loss, “collateral damage” in the global war for democracy.

The OSCE/ODIHR employs an observation methodology that ensures it captures results from a statistically significant sample of polling stations on election day, but its methodology does not include standards for how many cases of blatant fraud constitute a breach in international norms for elections. How much fraud in how many precincts does it take to prevent the OSCE from labeling an election as “consistent with international standards?” How many voters can be denied having their vote accurately counted for the election to be judged undemocratic? These are the chief operative questions in assessing the democratic quality of elections in Armenia, or any other state for that matter.

While the OSCE/ODIHR does a fine job of mobilizing large numbers of observers from a diverse set of countries and backgrounds, and gathers data that is highly accurate on the conduct of the elections it observes, its interpretation of that data is much less systematic, requiring a level of subjectivity that seems out of place and needs to be minimized in the future. This lack of formal standards that can be applied in a systematic way has the potential to lead the international community to allow cosiderations other than the quality of democracy into their judgements of elections they observe. Political considerations, foreign aid disbursements, and strategic alliances all seem more salient when the standards for judging elections are maliable or context specific. At the very least it can lead to percieved (if not genuine) hypocracy on the part of the observing states and organizations. Defining a set of genuine standards for evaluating elections is the next major task we in the international elections community are faced with going forward, and it is a task to which we need to devote serious thought and resources as the label “free and fair” becomes more and more valuable.