Members of an election commission count ballots at a polling station in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 26.Kostya Manenkov/The Associated Press
Georgia’s central electoral commission said it would recount ballots at some 14 per cent of polling stations on Tuesday after a disputed parliamentary election in the South Caucasus country.
Official results said the governing Georgian Dream party won nearly 54 per cent of Saturday’s vote, but pro-Western opposition parties and Georgia’s president have said the result was rigged. Thousands of people protested on Monday night in the capital Tbilisi.
The European Union, NATO and the United States have demanded a full investigation into reports of vote-buying, voter intimidation and ballot stuffing raised by monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and other bodies.
The election commission, which previously hailed the vote as free and fair, said it would conduct a recount of ballots in five randomly selected polling stations in each of Georgia’s 84 electoral districts.
Georgian law provides for such a recount to be initiated up to six days after an election has taken place, whether or not allegations of voting violations have been made.
The electoral commission did not say when the results of the recount would be made public.
“To ensure transparency, all authorized representatives are invited to observe the ballot recount process,” the commission said in a statement.
Official results showed Georgian Dream won 1.12 million votes – 335,000 votes more than the combined four main opposition parties, which are deeply divided.
The party won huge margins of up to 90 per cent in some rural areas, but underperformed in Tbilisi and other large cities.
My Vote, a Georgian monitoring coalition, said it had uncovered evidence of “large-scale election fraud” confirmed by photographs, videos and eyewitness testimonies from its observers.
It said it had logged over 900 reports of voting irregularities at over a third of polling stations across the country and was taking its findings to the electoral commission.
Tens of thousands of Georgians massed outside parliament, demanding the annulment of the weekend parliamentary election that the president has alleged was rigged with the help of Russia.
The Associated Press