Pashinyan won at polling station 10/30
Nikol Pashinyan received three more invalid ballots at the 10/30 polling station today after a recount and exceeded Ara Simonyan by one vote. Editor of "Haykakan Zhamanak" daily Nikol Pashinyan had 143 votes, while member of "National Unity" Ara Simonyan had 145.
Let us remind that the candidates' proxies could appeal for recounts at 10 polling stations until 2 p.m. yesterday. Nikol Pashinyan's proxies sent 2 appeals for recounts and Ara Simonyan's proxies filed 11 appeals for recounts to the electoral commission of the 10th precinct.
The recount began this morning and will take 5 working days. Chair of the electoral commission Silva Markosyan told journalists that the recount began from that polling station due to appropriateness and because both candidates had filed appeals for polling station 10/30. But halfway through the recount, Nikol Pashinyan's proxy Haykaz Mkrtchyan left the polling station, saying that a point of the RA Electoral Code had been violated. According to that, the appeals had to be examined in order, taking into account the time they were filed. Nikol Pashinyan's proxies filed their appeals in the last minutes, while Ara Simonyan brought the appeals at night. However, they were received in the morning.
"Since Ara Simonyan had many appeals and there would probably not be enough time to look at all of them, we opened Nikol Pashinyan's appeals. There is no violation of the law and the commission has the right to such a decision. It didn't even cross my mind that there could have been disappointment," underlined Silva Markosyan.
Haykaz Mkrtchyan complained about the fact that the commission didn't maintain the sequence of appeals, but added that there would not be enough time to look at Ara Simonyan's appeals.
Before leaving, he also filed an appeal-complaint, mentioning that all of Ara Simonyan's appeals were handwritten and were presented in one package. Let us mention that one of the invalid ballots was in favor of leader of the "Marxist" party David Hakobyan, while the number of Ara Simonyan's ballots remained the same.
