Print this page
Monday, 03 November 2003

OSCE CONDEMNS MARRED GEORGIA PARLIAMENTARY POLL

Published in News Digest

By empty (11/3/2003 issue of the CACI Analyst)

The weekend parliamentary election in the former Soviet republic of Georgia was marred by \"spectacular\" voting irregularities, international observers warned. \"We all yesterday witnessed some quite spectacular failures of the electoral administration,\" said Bruce George, president of the parliamentary assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe which had more than 400 observers monitoring the vote. The failures \"raise questions about the capacity of the parliamentary and government authorities to run a credible election,\" George said Monday at a news conference in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.
The weekend parliamentary election in the former Soviet republic of Georgia was marred by \"spectacular\" voting irregularities, international observers warned. \"We all yesterday witnessed some quite spectacular failures of the electoral administration,\" said Bruce George, president of the parliamentary assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe which had more than 400 observers monitoring the vote. The failures \"raise questions about the capacity of the parliamentary and government authorities to run a credible election,\" George said Monday at a news conference in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. \"My colleagues and I were totally shocked at what we saw at polling stations,\" said Thomas Cox, head of the delegation from the Council of Europe\'s parliamentary assembly. \"Decent honest people who wanted to vote yesterday in many cases could not,\" Cox said. \"This situation must not be allowed to happen in this country again.\" Georgia, a former Soviet republic in the Caucasus, voted Sunday in a parliamentary election seen as a referendum on the rule of veteran President Eduard Shevardnadze, the man blamed by many here for a decade of corruption and misrule. Early election results showed Shevardandze\'s party suffering losses in the 235-seat Georgian parliament, netting 23.9 percent of the vote, down from the nearly 42 percent it won during the last parliamentary ballot in 1999. (AFP)
Read 2123 times