Election day in Georgia marred by reports of street violence and vote rigging

Saturday’s election in Georgia was marred by widespread reports of procedural violations, including ballot-box stuffing, voter intimidation, street violence and the vandalisation of offices belonging to opposition parties.

In one video shared widely across social media, a man in a polling station in the southern Georgian city of Marneuli blatantly stuffs ballots into the box as election volunteers look on stunned.

The person who recorded the incident, Azad Karimov, a regional UNM official, was later physically assaulted. In the end the polling station was closed so the vote was nullified.

In the city of Telavi in eastern Georgia, members of a TV crew for Georgian national broadcaster Pirveli TV were reportedly assaulted and their equipment destroyed after they documented cases of alleged vote buying and voter intimidation.

In another violent incident, a group of men stormed the offices of the opposition United National Movement (UNM) in Tbilisi and a UNM representative, Mariam Dolidze, was attacked and later hospitalised with both head and body injuries.

Observers from the Georgian Young Lawyers Association (GYLA) said that they had recorded a total of roughly 300 cases of electoral malfeasance on voting day, while a coalition of civil society groups observing the election in the early hours of Sunday accused the government of engaging in a “complex scheme of election fraud” and demanded an annulment of the results.

“This election was not fair. There were too many issues, and these results are definitely not legitimate,” Transparency International Georgia executive director Eka Giguari said following the vote, adding that the organisation had not seen an election with a similar “level of violations” in its 24 years of operation in the country.

“We noted cases of vote buying and double voting before and during elections especially in the rural areas,” said Iulian Bulai, the head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s (PACE) election observation mission in Georgia on Sunday.

In a post-election briefing on Sunday, the chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC) Giorgi Kalandarishvili said that electronic voting machines, used for the first time in this election, had been a success, adding that “the elections took place in a peaceful and free environment”.

Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze also described the elections as “peaceful”, alleging that provocations had been staged by opposition-leaning television crews, while Tbilisi’s Georgian Dream mayor Kakha Kaladze warned the opposition that any “illegal” actions would “be met with a very harsh response from the state.”

However, the leader of the opposition For Georgia party, Giorgi Gakharia, accused Georgian Dream’s founder Bidzina Ivanishvili of “violating the will of the Georgian people” and called for “smart forms” of protest “aimed first and foremost at protecting the choice of our citizens, protecting the European future of our country, and protecting the electoral institution.”