ARMENIA: PLANNED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION EXIT POLL CREATES CONTROVERSY
Emil Danielyan

Eurasianet
Jan 7 2008
New York

The United States has offered to organize and finance a first-ever
exit poll in Armenia as part of an effort to promote a free-and-fair
presidential election on February 19. The initiative has been
endorsed by the election favorite, Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian,
while causing serious misgivings among his main challengers.

The main source of opposition candidates’ concern is the apparent
willingness of US officials to rely on an Armenian polling organization
with reputed close ties to the Armenian government. Its pre-election
opinion polls have long been criticized as misleading by Armenian
opposition and civic groups.

Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, most elections in Armenia have
been marred by serious instances of fraud, and strongly criticized
by Western observers. Western monitors deemed the most recent,
parliamentary elections, held in May 2007, to be more democratic
than the previous ones, although the divided Armenian opposition
again alleged widespread irregularities. [For background see the
EurasiaNet special feature Armenia: Vote 2007]. The United States
and the European Union have since been pressing the administration
of outgoing President Robert Kocharian to make sure that the February
19 presidential vote marks an improvement over the parliamentary polls.

Preparations for the presidential ballot were high on the agenda of
a December 4 meeting between Sarkisian and Joseph Pennington, the
US charge d’affaires in Yerevan. A government statement quoted the
Armenian premier as welcoming the proposed exit poll. "We were very
pleased at the prime minister’s very positive response, and we hope to
be able to do this," Pennington told reporters on December 17. He said
the exit poll would "enhance the credibility" of official vote results.

The remarks came amid a growing debate over the credibility of
an ongoing series of opinion polls financed by the US Agency for
International Development and commissioned by the Washington-based
International Republican Institute (IRI). Although the polls
are nominally conducted by a Lithuanian affiliate of the Gallup
Organization, it is the controversial Armenian Sociological Association
(ASA) that has done the crucial fieldwork of interviewing citizens and
submitting the resulting data to the US pollster. The purpose of the
"Armenia National Study" project launched by the USAID two years ago
is to gauge public opinion on a wide range of issues facing Armenia,
including the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and relations
with Turkey.

Respondents have also been asked to rate the country’s main political
parties and presidential candidates. The IRI has chosen not to
publicize the results of these queries, notifying instead each of
those parties and candidates only of their own approval ratings. Most
of them have made available their respective figures to the media,
with Prime Minister Sarkisian appearing to be by far the most popular
of the presidential hopefuls. According to the most recent survey,
Sarkisian is on target to garner about 30 percent of the vote.

Opposition leader and former parliamentary speaker Artur Baghdasarian
would finish a distant second with 12 percent.

Another opposition candidate, former President Levon Ter-Petrosian,
was attracting just 2 percent support in the most recent poll, despite
being viewed by many local commentators as Sarkisian’s most formidable
challenger. Betraying concern about the former president’s political
appeal, incumbent authorities have cracked down on Ter-Petrosian
allies and vilified him in government-controlled media outlets in
recent months. Yet, if one is to believe the Gallup/ASA pollsters,
Ter-Petrosian has become even more unpopular with Armenians since
holding the biggest opposition rallies in Yerevan in years in October
and November. "This is too ridiculous to be true," said Aleksandr
Arzumanian, a Ter-Petrosian campaign coordinator.

The credibility of the polls has also been questioned by Baghdasarian
and Vahan Hovannisian, the presidential candidate of the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (ARF), a junior partner in the Sarkisian-led
governing coalition. Like Ter-Petrosian and his aides, they have
stressed the fact that the polls are being conducted by the ASA,
whose chairman, Gevorg Poghosian, is known to have close ties to the
government. They allege that Poghosian is manipulating polling data
on government orders to legitimize possible vote rigging.

Sarkisian laughed off such allegations as "fairy tales" on December
26. The US Embassy in Armenia likewise defended the polls on December
28, saying that they use a "methodology that is the mainstay of
reputable Western polling organizations." Embassy representatives
also played down the ASA’s role in the process. "It is common practice
to work with local organizations in carrying out such public opinion
polls," the embassy said in a statement.

The statement made it clear that the Vilnius-based Baltic Surveys
Ltd./Gallup Organization will also be entrusted with holding the
planned exit poll on election day, suggesting that the ASA will be
closely involved in its conduct. According to aides to Ter-Petrosian,
Hovannisian and Baghdasarian interviewed by EurasiaNet, ASA’s
participation would be enough to make the poll untrustworthy for
Sarkisian’s three main challengers.

"We don’t trust the Armenian Sociological Association and believe
that it works on government orders," claimed Arzumanian. "If Serzh
Sarkisian issues a relevant order, the results of the exit poll will
be the same as the ones the authorities will try to get by fraudulent
means on election day."

"It would be right if the Americans conducted the poll by themselves,
rather than through the ASA or other local organizations whose
objectivity and professionalism is well known to us," said Spartak
Seyranian, a spokesman for the ARF.

"Exit polls will be worth it only if they don’t involve any Armenian
organization," agreed Heghine Bisharian, Baghdasarian’s campaign
manager. "We can’t regard them as trustworthy if they are conducted
in the same format [as the ongoing opinion polls]."

A spokesman for Sarkisian’s Republican Party of Armenia scoffed
at these statements. "They know very well that Serzh Sarkisian’s
rating is much higher than theirs," Eduard Sharmazanov told
EurasiaNet. "And I don’t think that the Americans would entrust this
job to non-professionals."

Editor’s Note: Emil Danielyan is a Yerevan-based journalist and
political analyst.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress