Monitoring results: misusing of administrative resources in pre-election period

There are not any large-scale cases of misusing administrative resources ahead of the 2013 Presidential Elections according to Transparency International Georgia, in a new monitoring report released today.

An interim report which covers monitoring from July 1, 2013 to October 23 reveals that compared to the 2012 parliamentary Elections, there were far less instances of the misuse of administrative resources for electoral purposes.

"This has made the election environment seem more peaceful and competitive", Tbilisi based watchdog says.

Transparency International claims that legislative resources were misused when the Central Election Commission declined Salome Zourabishvili request to register as a presidential candidate with no reasonable grounds, and when President Saakashvili issued two orders as a result of which many inmates were pardoned and thousands of people were granted Georgian citizenship, respectively. Also, the organization says that when the Minister of Education allowed for secondary enrollments after the applicants failed to get seats in the universities of their first preference, might be considered a misuse of the resources.

As for the institutional resources, the watchdog says they were misused most frequently for electoral purposes. Namely, this refers civil servants violating the law by participating in the pre-election rallies in Zugdidi, Poti and Chokhatauri. At the same time, compared to the 2012 parliamentary elections, the current campaign was marked with less cases of mobilizing civil servants for campaigning.

"There were almost no instances of the misuse of state financial resources during the 2013 presidential campaign. We observed one instance in Ajara where the funding for specific programs of the local budget was increased after July 1. This constituted a violation of the law, as increasing the funding of any program is not permitted in the pre-election period. The law was later amended to stipulate that the state budget programs may not be increased in the two years before elections, and not during the pre-election period", TI says in its report.