A vote rigging scandal which will go down in infamy
Georgia has been plunged into a fresh political crisis after the country’s president Salome Zourabichvili accused the Moscow-leaning government of rigging parliamentary elections to secure a fourth successive term in office.
The October 26 ballot was billed by many as a stark choice between a future within the European Union (E.U.) or a retreat into the Russian fold.
A kaleidoscope coalition of pro-E.U. parties led by the United National Movement (UNM) - which I helped found more than 20 years ago - was widely expected to unseat the incumbent Georgian Dream party, controlled from the shadows by the Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Dirty elections are nothing new in Georgia but what ensued this time was a vote rigging scandal which will go down in infamy.
Videos pinged around the world of ballot boxes being stuffed, opposition campaigners being attacked, and voters being marched into polling stations under the watchful glare of Ivanishvili’s heavy mob.
Opposition voters complained that local government officials had seized their IDs in the weeks prior, leaving them unable to cast their ballots, while TV cameras swooped in on vote buying offences in progress.
As the day wore on, it became hard to keep track of the number of electoral violations. What we were witnessing was gangsterism, pure and simple, and it was particularly striking that there was little effort made to disguise it.
Even so, when voting stations closed at 8pm there was reason to be optimistic that the opposition might carry the day despite the best efforts of Ivanishvili’s thugs.
A slew of exit polls forecast that the four-group opposition coalition had won approximately 53% of the popular vote compared with the government’s 41%. Based on this, the coalition was projected to secure around 83 parliamentary seats compared with 67 For GD.
That optimism was short-lived, however. As official counting by the Ivanishvili-friendly Central Election Commission (CEC) began, a very different picture began to emerge. Georgian Dream were not just holding their own, they were somehow increasing their popular vote (assuming you believed the figures).
When all the votes had been tabulated, it emerged that Georgian Dream had miraculously secured 54% of the vote – 13% more than the exit polls projected and around 20% more than polls taken a week earlier had forecast.
People quickly began to smell a rat, President Zourabichvili among them. Suspiciously, the government party had polled close to 100% in some rural constituencies (having polled roughly half that in the same precincts at the previous election). This was, of course, absurd, not least of all because these precincts were in the very same district where Ivanishvili’s supporters had been filmed stuffing ballot boxes.
President Zourabichvili spoke for the nation when she said in a televised address that Georgia had been the victim of a “Russian special operation” and that the election results were a sham.
“This was total rigging,” she said, flanked by the opposition leaders. “A total robbery of your votes.”
Georgian Dream tried to discredit her claims, but the statisticians were quick to back her. A subsequent review by exit pollster HarrisX found “statistically unexplainable data discrepancies” involving at least 172,523 votes in 27 districts, or at least 8 per cent of the votes cast.
Edison Research, an American polling company which had predicted Georgian Dream wins in previous elections, found that the deviation from statistically expected results was widespread but most pronounced at specific polling locations in rural areas.
Of course, people will remind us that election polls have been wrong in the past, and point to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the United States presidential race, or John Major’s Conservative majority in the 1992 UK parliamentary election.
These outcomes will have haunted many a pollster to their grave, but let’s be clear: neither Trump nor Major trailed by 20-point margins in the days before voters went to the polls. And neither man languished 13 points behind in the exit polls.
So, what next for Georgia? Fresh protests are already underway on the streets of Tbilisi with the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom leading a global chorus of condemnation of the Ivanishvili regime (the fact Iran and Venezuela were first on the phone to offer Ivanishvili their congratulations speaks volumes).
Nevertheless, Ivanishvili appears confident he can defy Western pressures and continue to rule Georgia as his personal fiefdom.
Whatever his intentions, the consequences of this stolen election will reverberate locally and internationally for some time to come.
Existing foreign investors are already starting to take fright following a series of recent police raids on a U.S. think tank and a Silicon Valley tech giant based in Tbilisi – raids which many suspect were Ivanishvili’s way of showing the White House he wasn’t going to be pushed around.
And European Union membership – already stalled thanks to a Russian-inspired crackdown on dissent in the Spring - seems totally implausible under the current regime.
This is an unsettling moment for Georgia and its people. Being free, it seems, is harder than ever. But amid the disillusionment and despair, there is hope to be found too. Hope that mounting evidence of Russian meddling in Georgia and Moldova will jolt the West into more robust action to counter Putin’s expansionist ambition. Hope that U.S. lawmakers will see the growing threat and continue to fund Ukraine’s fightback against the Russian advance. And hope that in Georgia, the fractured opposition will finally put old differences aside and start rebranding under a single flag.
Freedom may still be possible even if many battles have already been lost. The final chapter in this struggle is still being written.
David Kezerashvili is Georgia’s former Minister of Defence.
