TBILISI (Reuters) – Georgia’s central electoral commission said it would recount ballots at some 14% of polling stations on Tuesday after independent monitors raised concerns about the conduct of Saturday’s parliamentary election.
Official results said the governing Georgian Dream party won nearly 54% of the vote, but pro-Western opposition parties and Georgia’s president have said the result was rigged. Thousands of people protested on Monday night in the capital Tbilisi.
The European Union, NATO and the United States have demanded a full investigation into reports of vote-buying, voter intimidation and ballot stuffing raised by monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and other bodies.
The election commission, which previously hailed the vote as free and fair, said it would conduct a recount of ballots in five randomly selected polling stations in each of Georgia’s 84 electoral districts.
It did not say when the results of the recount would be made public.
“To ensure transparency, all authorized representatives are invited to observe the ballot recount process,” the commission said in a statement.
Official results showed Georgian Dream won 1.12 million votes – 335,000 votes more than the combined four main opposition parties, which are deeply divided.
The party won huge margins of up to 90% in some rural areas, but underperformed in Tbilisi and other large cities.
My Vote, a Georgian monitoring coalition, said it had uncovered evidence of “large-scale election fraud” confirmed by photographs, videos and eyewitness testimonies from its observers.
It said it had logged over 900 reports of voting irregularities at over a third of polling stations across the country and was taking its findings to the electoral commission.
(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou and Felix Light; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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