Parliament Speaker urges US Congress for “open, persuasive” investigation of “fake” NGO results for 2020 Georgian elections

Georgia’s Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Tuesday urged the United States Congress to “investigate the manipulative distortion” of the parallel vote tabulation results of the 2020 parliamentary elections in Georgia by “US-funded non-governmental organisations”, in reference to an incident that involved the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy publishing erroneous data following the conclusion of voting before acknowledging the issue.

Papuashvili claimed an investigation by the US body into the incident would demonstrate “due appreciation of Georgians’ commitment to the friendship with America”.

To this day, we have not received a convincing answer to the question of what role the US Government representatives and US-funded non-governmental organisations played in disseminating false PVT results in the wake of the 2020 Parliamentary elections in Georgia”, he said.  

Papuashvili noted the ISFED had disseminated “false PVT results”, which he stressed had become a “pretext for the opposition to foment unrest, demand extraordinary elections, and pursue a boycott of the Parliamentary work”. 

The official claimed the development had “damaged not only Georgian democracy but also our country’s reputation. That is when the false narratives about the ‘backsliding’ of Georgian democracy started to circulate”. 

The Parliament Speaker claimed the Georgian authorities knew “for sure” that the NGO had “purposefully” disseminated the erroneous results while the United States Agency for International Development “knew about it and kept it from Georgian authorities and Georgian people”. 

He added Elene Nizharadze, the then director of the ISFED who was dismissed from the post following the incident, was then reappointed at the Montenegro office of the European Network of Election Monitoring Organisations, which Papuashvili said was “funded by the same donor” as her previous organisation.

The lawmaker added “one of the high-ranking representatives of the USAID”, who he said “knew about and still concealed” the falsity of the PVT results had become chief of the USAID mission “in another country”. 

A separate issue is what the then US Ambassador in Georgia [Kelly Degnan] knew [while she] acted as a mediator between the Georgian Government and opposition”, Papuashvili also said.

“Since [the] USAID is a US Government institution and is physically situated in US Embassy premises, it is difficult to believe that the Ambassador was kept in the dark about the issue. If it turns out that the Ambassador knew about the falsehood of the PVT results and, nonetheless, kept it secret, then this revelation turns upside down the integrity of the entire facilitation and mediation efforts during the April 19 [2021] Agreement process [between the ruling GD and the opposition to end the post-election crisis]”, he added.

The Parliament Speaker said his comments were coming in reaction to the recent “resurgence of acute interest” towards Georgia among members of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the US Helsinki Commission, which the official claimed “reminds us of a disappointing and burdensome issue that remains in Georgia-US relations”. 

He said “being in denial of the issues” in Georgian-American relations “does not really help our strategic partnership”. 

The US Congress has every leverage to investigate this issue. However, instead of providing persuasive answers to the above questions, we only hear accusations in spreading false narratives, which, increasingly, look more like attempts to silence the critics than caring about the truth”, he alleged. 

He further claimed that Georgia had “stood by the American people whenever it was needed. The Helsinki Commission claims to speak on behalf of the American people, and we, as the democratically elected Georgian authorities, tell them, on behalf of the people of Georgia, to investigate this thorny issue and set the record straight”. 

The US Helsinki Commission on Monday posted “we have a responsibility to support them [the Georgian people] as they pursue this reality [to be part of Euro-Atlantic institutions], especially as they face Russian interference and erosion of democracy at home”, while in its previous comments the Commission praised the MEGOBARI Act, a bill envisaging sanctions against “Georgian officials responsible for undermining democracy” and called on the US State Department to “crack down” on a criminal scheme of fraudulent call centre operations, which it claimed  “sponsor Georgian Dream’s antidemocratic campaign against the Georgian people”.