More than 3,000 polling stations opened at 8 a.m. in Georgia’s crucial October 26 parliamentary elections, billed by pro-Western Georgians as a “referendum” on the country’s choice between Russia and Europe.
3,508,294 voters are eligible to cast ballots in the first fully-proportional vote to elect a 150-member Parliament. Georgians will choose from 18 political parties, including the increasingly authoritarian and anti-Western ruling Georgian Dream party and four major opposition political forces (three coalitions and one party) seeking to challenge its 12-year rule.
This is the first Georgian election to be conducted with predominantly electronic voting, meaning that voters will cast ballots at polling stations using electronic machines that identify and count the votes. About 90% (3,113,747) of voters will vote using this new procedure. Remote and overseas constituencies will use traditional polling procedures.
67 out of 3,111 precincts are abroad, in 42 different countries, with 95,910 people registered to vote overseas, a 45% increase over the 2020 election. 135,922 Georgians will be able to vote for the first time.
Over 100 local and more than 60 international observation missions have been registered to monitor the elections, and key local watchdogs will provide regular updates on election day.
Ballots in electronic precincts across Georgia will be counted automatically after the polls close at 8 pm, and based on the automatic count, the Central Election Commission is expected to release preliminary results today, several hours after the polls close. The final official results, which will also include precincts that voted by the traditional method, are expected early tomorrow after all ballots – including those in electronic precincts – have been hand-counted.
International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), the key Georgian election watchdog group, plans to publish the results of Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT), a statistical method to verify the official results, on October 27.
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