March 3rd was the deadline for submitting party registration applications to the Central Electoral Commission of Armenia (CEC) in order to participate in the May 12, 2007 Parliamentary Elections. Kronstadt at ALS movement has some figures:
[…]over 1400 candidates have been registered on the Party lists alone
28 parties have entered the elections race and only 1 alliance (Impeachment).[…]
Armenia Blog quotes ArmenPress, bringing even more figures to look at:
All Armenia is divided into 926 territorial-administrative units, called communities, including 48 urban and 866 rural communities. The biggest community is the capital city Yerevan, which is said to have 1.1 million population.
The second biggest community is the town of Gyumri, the administrative center of the north-western province of Shirak. It has 147,000 population. Vanadzor, the capital of north-eastern Lori has 105,000 population.
There’s also some negative statistics at the ALS Movement:
[…]After the failure to come up with a list of candidates for the parliamentary elections, the Justice block (comprising of 9 opposition parties) has ceased to exist.
At the same time another force in Armenian politics, formerly known as Ayl@mtranq socio-political initiative, has re-branded itself as “Impichment” in just over a week after it marched across the streets of Yerevan sporting its funky “@” logo and calling itself “The Alternative”. Now, it seems, Ayl@ntranq has moderated it’s radicalism… When asked, they confirmed that they offer Ishkhanapokhutyun (a change of government), which in our view is hardly an Alternative.
The blog further expresses “a concern about the ideological direction of this movement when it comes to other issues and policies”, and touches upon the demonstration held by the Alternative on March 2 in front of Matenadaran square in Yerevan:
[…]300 or so people gathered near Matenadaran […] the absolute majority of the gathered were pensioners and people over the age of 40. There was also a small group of young ones, who apparently looked like they didn’t belong there. […]
Kornelij Glas had a semi-live photo-coverage of the event also, and the photos further come to prove the figures. Uzogh is apparently trying to collect some figures as he posts about the Virtual Parliament Elections Poll with the following suggestions / details of participation:
- Please advertise this poll in your blogs
- Closing date is 18th of March
- Poll is made public to avoid cheating
- Votes for more than 1 party from the same person will be erased from final results
- People, who do not want to register Livejournal account, but still want to vote – must create OpenID account.
I don’t know about free and fair, but these are definitely going to be very very very interesting elections!
Do you feel any concern about the freedom of expression and/or fairness of voters in my journal?
Let me assure you that I never wanted to implement any kind of censorship or control over my audience.
PS. Please clarify your vote in my original post – you’ve vote in all 3 sections of the poll – it means that you have committed virtual “ballot stuffing”.
🙂
hi. The deadline was actually 3rd of March. Minor correction.
thanx… corrected