PROSECUTORS PLEDGE ‘SWIFT’ ACTION ON FRAUD REPORTS
By Karine Kalantarian and Astghik Bedevian

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Jan 23 2008

Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General said on Wednesday that it
has formed an hoc unit tasked with preventing and reacting to possible
instances of fraud in the upcoming presidential election.

"I have reason to state that we are in a position to again swiftly
react to and investigate reports of elections violations," said Aram
Tamazian, a deputy prosecutor-general overseeing the unit’s work.

A similar team of prosecutors already operated before and during last
May’s parliamentary elections. The law-enforcement agency says it
opened and sent to court 17 criminal cases against individuals accused
of committing various vote irregularities. None of them are known to
be senior government officials or heads of election commissions.

According to Tamazian, the unit’s main source of information is fraud
reports and allegations appearing in the Armenian press. He said it
has seen no evidence of serious violations so far, complaining that
most of them are too "general" to warrant criminal proceedings against
individuals involved in the conduct of the February 19 election.

"I hope that reports by our media outlets will be more substantive
so that we are able to display a more concrete approach," he told
journalists.

The senior prosecutor said the anti-fraud task force is also ready to
look into similar reports by election observers and candidates. "We
will investigate a report or complaint from any party," he said.

The upcoming ballot is expected to be closely watched by more than
300 foreign observers and an even larger number of local monitors.

The head of Armenia’s largest vote-monitoring group, It’s Your Choice,
said on Wednesday that it plans to deploy observers in each of the
1,923 polling stations across the country.

Harutiun Hambartsumian told RFE/RL that his organization has
already launched its observation mission and has found only minor
election-related violations so far. He said It’s Your Choice observers
found, in particular, serious inaccuracies in voter lists in the
northern town of Stepanavan.

So far Hambartsumian’s observers have not reported any case of vote
buying, which is believed to have been widespread in the May 2007
elections. "It is very hard to prove vote buying because people
accepting vote bribes won’t say who paid them," he told RFE/RL.

Even those refusing to sell their votes will not necessarily make
such revelations. RFE/RL received on Wednesday a phone call from a
Yerevan resident who claimed to have been offered 5,000 drams ($16)
in return for voting for Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian. The man
identified himself as Aharon Yesayan but refused to name the person
who allegedly offered him a bribe.