Parliament Speaker urges ISFED NGO to release full results of parallel vote tabulation of parliamentary elections

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Monday urged the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy to release the full results of its  parallel vote tabulation of the parliamentary elections held on Saturday.

Papuashvili’s comments came after the ISFED on Sunday announced its verification of the parallel vote tabulation was consistent with the results announced by the Central Election Commission of Georgia, but added that “the results cannot be used as a measure of the validity of the electoral process”.

In his response, Papuashvili claimed the organisation was “concealing” its parallel vote tabulation report from the public.

The Speaker further claimed the “scenario” of the 2020 parliamentary elections, when the organisation delayed the publication of the results of the PVT, had been “repeated”.

According to their methodology, their report is published before the report of the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, at 12pm, and even then [in 2020] it was delayed, because they rigged the results”, he said.

“The same thing has happened again this year. The ISFED did not publish the results. After various entities asked what is going on with parallel counting, yesterday, late at night, they released a statement”, he alleged.

“Of course, they could not avoid this, and said that the results of their counting coincided with the results of the Central Election Commission, although they concealed the rest of the details and did not want to inform the public. We therefore request that the ISFED fully publish the results of the parallel counting”, Papuashvili continued.

He further stressed it was the “responsibility” of the United States-based National Democratic Institute to force the ISFED to publish the complete report of the counting, which he alleged “will include all the frauds that are now alleged by the opposition and some foreign actors”.

I will remind you that yesterday the NDI monitoring mission held a briefing, and its Head also indicated that they were waiting for the ISFED parallel count report, so it is now the NDI's responsibility to call on and force the ISFED to publish the complete report of parallel counting”, the Speaker noted.

Papuashvili further claimed the domestic opposition was “preparing not for the election [results], but for the post-election period”.

“The Central Election Commission has already completed the counting of votes. The results of the elections are already clear - by almost 900,000 votes the Georgian Dream defeated the second-placed party, and this is a great victory for the Georgian people”, the Speaker said.

He urged the opposition to “abandon the disinformation campaign”, and further pointed out that “democratic, free elections were held in Georgia, where the Georgian people gave their verdict and everyone should come to terms with this verdict”.