Georgia’s 2024 parliamentary elections will be the first time Shoghik Kurkchyan, 20, will be able to vote, and the first time she will observe the elections. A second-year banking and finance student at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University, Kurkchyan tells Civil.ge that she applied to a local monitoring mission to register as an observer to “help people vote fairly” and ensure that the overall process is fair.
Often described as a “referendum” on Georgia’s choice between Russia and Europe, the October 26 general elections are considered one of the most closely watched in the country’s history.
“This is the most important election ever held in independent Georgia, and therefore in Georgian history,” Lado Napetvaridze, a 35-year-old researcher, tells Civil.ge. This won’t be the first election for Napetvaridze, who has a Ph.D. in political science and teaches at Tbilisi State University, but October 26 will also be the first vote he’ll be monitoring as a registered observer.
Some three and a half million Georgians will be eligible to cast their ballots in the country’s first fully proportional vote that follows months of anti-democratic drifts by the ruling Georgian Dream party, including passing Foreign Agents Law and anti-LGBT legislation. The moves led to the suspension of the country’s EU integration process months after it became a candidate country, leaving pro-European and pro-democracy Georgians fearful of their country’s irreversible descent into authoritarianism.
Pro-Western opposition parties and coalitions will attempt to challenge Georgian Dream’s 12-year rule. But with the ruling party’s vast administrative, financial, and media resources, and the government’s escalating anti-LGBT propaganda, anti-Western conspiracies, and fear-mongering about Georgia repeating Ukraine’s fate of the Russian aggression, there is a widespread understanding that the race will be close, and the stakes will be high.
“I am worried about my university,” Kurkchyan says, expressing concern about the fate of Ilia State University, one of Georgia’s most popular higher education institutions, which has recently faced obstacles to its full accreditation. The trouble is widely believed to be part of a government crackdown on critical voices and institutions.
The elections worry many other younger Georgians as well, who are struggling to imagine their future in the country if the Georgian Dream remains in power.
The vote follows two widely contested elections in 2020 and 2021, in which local watchdogs expressed concerns that the level of violations during the campaign and on polling day – including alleged vote-buying, illegal mobilization efforts, and vote-counting irregularities – could have affected the final results.
Widespread fears that the ruling party might try to hijack the elections prompted thousands to volunteer to observe the vote and to apply to local monitoring groups. Everyone from first-time student voters to their professors, from a young piano prodigy to Georgia’s most famous opera singer has declared their intention to volunteer.
Missions Facing “Positive Challenge”
“It is very noticeable that a large part of the citizens not only want to participate in the elections but also want to observe,” Nino Dolidze, head of the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), Georgia’s key election watchdog group, tells Civil.ge.
The deployment of observers has increased especially in the overseas districts, Dolidze notes. There were special efforts this year to increase the participation of expatriate voters, which has traditionally been insignificant despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Georgian citizens live outside the country. 95,910 Georgians registered to vote abroad, about 45 percent more than in 2020, and while authorities did not open polling stations in various cities despite demand, there are active civic initiatives to help Georgian emigres with transportation on election day.
And unlike past elections, where observers were often assigned to random locations, this year’s observers are also more eager to exercise their right to vote, hoping to be deployed to polling stations where they are also registered as voters. “It is a positive challenge that all our observers want to vote,” says Dolidze, drawing a comparison with previous elections where this was less of a priority.
ISFED is one of more than 100 local organizations that have registered monitoring missions with the Central Election Commission (CEC). It plans to deploy some 1,500 observers inside and outside the country, and will again provide the results of the Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT), a statistical method to verify the official results. More than 60 international watchdogs have also registered to observe the vote, including traditional missions of OSCE/ODIHR, as well as the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), two U.S.-based nonprofits.
But while the number of registered organizations is about the same as before, mobilization on the ground looks more active than in past elections. Various initiatives and organizations such as “Observe”, “Protect”, and “Vote Guardian” have sprung up to train, inform, and deploy thousands of volunteers to protect the vote. In addition to the local missions that traditionally monitor Georgian elections, new ones have emerged, including My Vote, which unites dozens of civil society organizations and plans to deploy some 2,000 observers (selected from more than 4,000 applicants).
First Predominantly Electronic Vote
The October 26 vote will also be Georgia’s first election to be conducted largely electronically, meaning that voters will cast ballots at polling stations using electronic machines that identify and count the votes. 90% of voters in Georgia will cast their ballots using this new procedure.
While the new process is believed to reduce the risk of certain types of manipulation, there have been active information campaigns to educate voters about the changed way of casting a ballot (filling in a circle instead of circling a number) and about ways to avoid spoiled votes. There have also been efforts to reassure voters that their choices are anonymous, amid reports that the ruling party may be intimidating voters by suggesting that technologies store identity.
According to Dolidze, there are still risks of potential breaches that are not fully mitigated by new technologies, such as the possibility of a single person voting multiple times or casting a ballot for someone else. Also, “something could come up that we haven’t thought of,” ISFED chief says.
Based on electronic precincts, the CEC is expected to release preliminary official data later on election day, hours after the polls close at 8 p.m. local time. Final results are expected to be announced the following day after all ballots have been recounted by hand.
Until then, various activist groups have led active mobilization efforts, including calls to get out and vote, or initiatives to help commuting voters get to their polling places.
“Those around me who were never interested in politics are now planning to go to the polls and vote,” Napetvaridze says, arguing that the mobilization effort is not limited to volunteer observers. Both Kurkchyan and Napetvaridze expect to be able to cast a ballot in their respective constituencies – in Ninotsminda, Georgia’s southern Samtskhe-Javakheti region, and in Tbilisi – while they also observe the election.
Nini Gabritchidze/Civil.ge
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