CEC chair: ‘the process is proceeding normally’

According to Central Election Commission (CEC) chair Vahagn Hovakimyan, all polling stations began their work at 07:00 and began accepting voters at 08:00.

He noted that as of the time polls opened, there were ‘absentees’ in 48 out of the 42,005 polling stations, and in only three cases were two chairs and one secretary absent due to criminal proceedings.

‘The Electoral Code allows that if any member of the electoral commission is absent, the process continues anyway. In other words, the process is proceeding normally’, Hovakimyan said in a press briefing.

He added that while there had been some technical problems during this period, they were quickly resolved.

Separately, Hovakimyan stated that the CEC had organised around 16,000 training courses for members of electoral commissions, with another 4,000 courses for technical equipment workers.

‘Among the alerts coming in at 08:00, we noticed a coincidence that was essentially reporting incorrect information, mainly from proxies or entities that had not participated in our training’, he noted, before advising participants to join such training programmes in the future.