Secret Special Lists in Polling Stations

In Polling Station # 58 in Gardabani Election District, which is in the building of a public school, the controller of voter flow is standing in the corridor instead of at the entrance to the room. He told Human Rights Center’s observer that he did not know where to stand. At that moment, a crowd of people was standing at the entrance and some of  the voters entered the polling station without marking.

The most important fact is that a small space was allocated next to the controller in the corridor where documents were scattered. A HRC observer looked at these documents and found that they were from a citizens' identification database.

“MIA holds similar documents with ID data (except photos) and they must not be stored in polling stations. It is unclear why the commission members need these data. They might need them for so-called carousels,” HRC observer Nestan Londaridze in Karajala village reported.

She said it is difficult to register complaints in the villages inhabited by ethnic Azerbaijani people and they manage to register complaint only with the support of DEC members.

It is noteworthy that similar lists were discovered in Pankisi Gorge too; Human Rights Center’s observer and journalist Gela Mtivlishvili reported from Pankisi that a commission member at the polling station # 5 and representative of the National Movement Shalva Tsatiashvili were holding similar lists in the PS.

“I managed to take 22 of those documents and handed them to the District Election Commission; alongside this, I am writing a complaint about this violation and will attach those lists to the complaint. The lists were printed from the electronic database of the MIA in September. Presumably, residents of various villages of Pankisi Gorge are on the lists. It is unclear why the UNM representative was holding those lists but I definitely know that it is not public information and only investigators have access to such personal data,” Gela Mtivlishvili said.

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