Government Responds to OSCE Post-Election Report

In response to, and in an attempt to counter, the OSCE/ODIHR interim report criticizing the post-election process, the Georgian government has issued an explanatory note.

The OSCE/ODIHR post-election interim report notes that international observers identified a number of problems during the tabulation process, including examples of different data in vote summary protocols and unusually high voter turnout, particularly during the last few hours of voting.

In response, the Georgian government said that the report “fails to note that both problems affected a very limited number of precincts.” Hard evidence of differences between various protocols, it said, affects less than 1% of the overall number of precincts.

“The issue of high turnout during the last three hours affects less than 1.5% of precincts, and can be explained by the peculiarities of the affected precincts,” the government’s response reads. In says that the precincts reporting high voter turnout had four or five registration tables and voting booths.

Late high voter turnout, the government said, “has a simple explanation: the law allows a PEC to carry on operating past 20:00 if there are still voters queuing to cast their ballots.”

Regarding alleged discrepancies between the precinct vote summary protocols and those issued by the District Election Commissions, the government said the OSCE/ODIHR report fails to underline that this problem was only reported in a very limited number of cases.

“The CEC was only presented with a total of 27 PEC [precinct election commission] protocols alleging that results were altered in favour of Mr. Saakashvili. In seven of these cases, the CEC [Central Election Commission] itself corrected the data. In the other cases, the protocols submitted by the complaining party were technically invalid. The Report also fails to demonstrate the scale of the problem. Even if every one of these 27 cases constituted evidence of an attempt to skew the results in favour of Mr Saakashvili, the overall difference would only be of 3,426 votes, or 0.17% of the total,” the Georgian government said.

The international election observation mission monitored the vote count and completion of results protocols at 180 precinct election commissions throughout Georgia. “A significant 23% of counts observed were assessed as bad or very bad. Observers reported that in 8% of counts observed, they had witnessed tampering with results protocols. In 21% of counts observed, they reported significant procedural errors or omissions,” the post-election interim report said.