Georgian Elections-First Thoughts

CAUCASUS / CENTRAL ASIA - In Brief 27 Oct 2024 by Ivan Tchakarov

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The much-anticipated Parliamentary Elections took place yesterday in a much calmer environment than thought and the Central Election Commission has announced that Georgian Dream has confidently won. With 99.9% of the votes counted, the results are the following: Georgian Dream" - 54.93% with 89 mandates"Coalition for Change" - 10.92% with 18 mandates"Unity - to save Georgia" - 10.1% with 17 mandates"Strong Georgia" - 8.8% with 14 mandates"For Georgia" - 7.7% with 12 mandates Here we take the liberty of citing ourselves from our Oct 18th note, where we made the following prediction about how the elections will evolve. We argued that "In short, in our view, there will be a four-step process, including: 1) a simple majority win for Georgian Dream; 2) the opposition's claims that the elections have been rigged, with calls for massive public protests against the winner; 3) a resolute, but smart, response by law enforcement to violence; and 4) a gradual reduction in tensions as Georgia sets itself on a path of perceived isolation from the West, at least for the time being." This is exactly what has happened so far, with the opposition claiming that the election has been manipulated/rigged. In our view, this will be impossible to prove. In the elections to the Parliament of Georgia, voters voted through special machines that looked like a printer. People put the completed ballot into the machine, which instantly scanned it and determined who has voted for whom. At the end of the election day, the machine issued a list of parties similar to a cash receipt with the results of the voting. This system makes it difficult to effect fraud in the counting of votes, which is one of th...