At a briefing on November 4, Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili railed against what he called “disinformation” about alleged electoral fraud. However, the briefing attracted more attention not so much for its content, but for showing a map of Georgia without the occupied territories of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali.
Although elections cannot be held in Georgia’s occupied territories, their omission from the official map during the briefing of a state official caused public anger. Parliamentary Majority Leader Mamuka Mdinaradze was quick to dismiss the claims, saying that the occupied territories were shown in a pale colors, which he said the cameras had failed to detect.
“The people without a homeland began to post one after another, trying to overshadow what Shalva Papuashvili had done to them with this briefing,” Mdinaradze wrote, adding that the journalists who attended the briefing were provided with the presentation, where they could see that the occupied territories were not omitted from the official map, but were shown in almost white, very pale colors.
Briefing – Speaker Rejects Election-Related “Disinformation”
As for the content of the briefing, Speaker Papuashvili lashed out at the claims of local CSOs, the opposition and the President regarding the alleged electoral fraud. These allegations, which he rejected, include violations of vote secrecy rules, the Georgian Dream’s voter mobilization efforts, and suspicions of unusually high turnout in certain regions, among others.
First, he dismissed the concerns of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, one of the main election observers, which filed complaints to annul the results of all polling stations where voting was conducted using new technologies, based on the fact that the ballots were so thin that they revealed, which party the citizen had voted for, thus alleging a systemic violation of the secrecy of the vote.
Papuashvili cited elections in Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Moldova, all of which he claimed did not have ballots wrapped in special paper to conceal citizens’ choices and had semi-transparent ballot boxes. He said the GYLA is using this issue as a pretext “to take the elections away from the Georgian people.” He further claimed that local observer organizations have “political aims” and lashed out at their donors. “I have said many times that this is no longer the problem of a particular NGO, this is already the problem of donors who allow these fraudulent conclusions to be drawn by such organizations that are trying to deprive the Georgian people of the election through direct disinformation,” he said.
Second, Papuashvili addressed the opposition’s accusations that the ruling party was mobilizing its voters by illegal means, collecting their personal data, and using it as leverage to coerce their free will. While Papuashvili did not address the alleged illegal use of citizens’ personal data, he said that parties should have close contact with their supporters to ensure that they go to the polls. He discussed the NDI and IRI guidelines on how parties should communicate with their voters, claiming that the GD had not violated any rules and had conducted a genuine campaign to mobilize its supporters.
Third, Speaker addressed concerns about the unusually high voter turnout in regions where the GD won by large margins. In this context, he praised the GD’s pre-election campaign, spoke at length about the “delegates” it had appointed for each region, and accused the opposition of failing to communicate with people in the regions.
“In reality, the complex scheme they talked about is very simple. The scheme is called democracy and the support of the people. If the people do not support you, if you do not go to the people, [then] of course you have no chance to get good results; and secondly, about these elections, nobody should lie to themselves and should not calm down, especially in the opposition; in these elections, their catastrophic loss means one thing, that the Georgian people showed the traitors and people without a homeland the place they deserve and they should be there by the verdict of the Georgian people,” the Speaker concluded.
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