“The innovations did make the voting process more transparent. They impeded possible manipulations. In our estimation, the equipment caused difficulties in voting particularly for elderly people, as the scanners hardly registered them”, announced Sergey Lebedev, observer mission representative of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States – CIS, during the meeting with the representatives of the Armenian mass media.
Pursuant to him, the Parliamentary elections of April 2 were quiet and well organized. “From the perspective of transparency, our Armenian partners surpassed some of the Southern countries, which try to teach us how the elections are conducted.”
Lebedev believes that all political powers have had the opportunity to sufficiently accomplish their pre-election campaign: “Some say that the party in power has misused the administrative resource, but it has been in the norm. The representatives of the party (referring to Karen Karapetyan, Arpine Hovhannisyan, Vigen Sargsyan…-edit.) cannot cease their activities and stop appearing on the screen”. CIS observers have also noticed that fingerprint scanners have displayed technical issues that have immediately been solved.