Counting More Than Votes: Pre-Election Challenges in Armenia
28.11.2025
Only a few months remain until the 2026 Regular National Assembly Elections, and logically, the electoral agenda is at the core of the public and political discourse.
The increasing public interest in elections is also evidenced by the voter turnout figures in the recent Local Self-Government Body (LSGB) elections: 43% in Gyumri and 45% in Vagharshapat, compared to 24% and 27% participation in the previous elections in the same communities.
Political interest is more than obvious: new political movements, alliances, nominations, and active work behind the scenes.
When discussing the upcoming National Assembly elections, it is important to understand certain legislative changes that will shape the electoral environment. Perhaps the most important of these changes are the new thresholds, which will be 4% for parties and 8% for alliances consisting of 2-3 parties, and 10% for alliances composed of more than 4 parties. This change in thresholds makes the formation of large alliances less likely and encourages the participation of individual parties. It is also likely to lead to the "absorption" of smaller parties by more active ones or the formation of non-formal alliances, where there is no officially created alliance, but representatives of one party, along with their resources, are included on the list of another party.
It is no secret that assessing the quality of elections requires not only a calm and organized process on election day but also the entire electoral process, from the pre-election period to post-election procedures. However, the notorious history of Armenian elections—the memory of election days previously accompanied by fraud, vote buying, and violence—often leads to public and political assessments of elections in recent years focusing primarily on the peaceful conduct of election day, neglecting violations in the pre-election period that can fundamentally undermine the environment of free and fair competition. While acknowledging that relatively transparent and free electoral processes have been established in Armenia in recent years, there are still multi-layered problems in the pre-election phase, some of which will be addressed in this article.
Uncontrolled and Illegal Financial Flows
When talking about democratic elections, one must first have the answer to the question of how the participating parties are funded. Do they use prohibited sources of funding, such as donations from businesses and related legal entities, funds raised from other states, investments resulting from the misuse of state resources, and so on? Unfortunately, in the 2026 National Assembly elections, neither voters, journalists, nor NGOs and observers will know how parties are financing their pre-election funds. The reason is that pre-election funds will be financed exclusively from party accounts, and detailed information about these will only be published a year later in the parties' annual reports. This is a very delayed accountability, and the impact that illegal money can have on the elections will already be irreversible by the time of disclosure. It turns out that, without legislative changes, we will have elections where the principle of transparency will be undermined from the outset, at least regarding one critical component: financing.
Unfair Advantage at the Expense of State Resources
Observatory reports often mention the misuse of administrative resources during elections. Administrative resources are the human, financial, material, informational, transport, and other means that officials possess during elections, conditioned by their control over personnel, finances, and allocations in the public sector.
We see numerous cases of misuse of these resources during national and LSGB elections: additional, unplanned financial allocations to solve community problems, misuse of public television airtime, directing and compelling employees of state and community structures to participate in rallies, holding entertainment events with public resources, and so on. This, of course, gives a disproportionate and unfair advantage to the ruling party and candidates, undermining the principle of equality and the voter's freedom to form an opinion. Although the legislation provides for liability measures for violating the ban on the misuse of administrative resources, in practice, this vicious activity continues, and there is a high probability of seeing many manifestations in the upcoming National Assembly elections as well.
Undermining the Institution of Impartial Observation
Politically biased or "fake" observation is considered the monitoring of elections by groups and individuals who are not independent, pursue a political goal, engage in campaigning, and are interested in specific outcomes. Biased or fake observation is essentially a form of political activity aimed at promoting the interests of politicians or forces through the imitation of credible observation. Unlike independent and impartial observers, fake observation groups show less financial transparency and publish biased reports, if they publish them at all. The goal of fake observers is either to legitimize flawed elections or, conversely, to demean and undermine the authority of electoral institutions and free elections, create informational chaos, and thus promote their interests.
The Armenian Electoral Code prohibits observation missions from engaging in pre-election campaigning. Despite this, biased observation missions have operated actively and unhindered in the last two LSGB elections, and this activity suggests that they will have a greater presence in the upcoming National Assembly elections. This significantly damages the role and credibility of the observer as an impartial arbiter in elections, as voters are deprived of the opportunity to hear an unbiased opinion about the actual quality of the elections. The most important factor in elections is trust, and fake observers operating with political expediency create uncertainties and spread disinformation, which can lead to crises.
Hybrid Threats
The most trendy discourse surrounding elections is, of course, hybrid threats. Hybrid threats are multi-layered electoral threats created by external and internal actors, mainly coupled with disinformation, illegal financing of the competition, vote buying, and cyberattacks. Given the continued interest of external actors in influencing the political landscape in Armenia, the connections of recently activated political groups with foreign states, and the lessons learned from the elections in Moldova and Romania, the bodies responsible for organizing elections and civil society organizations must vigilantly analyze possible risks and work to counter them.
On the other hand, exaggerating hybrid threats and talking about them unnecessarily often—without fundamental control measures, but only with the aim of creating narratives or counter-narratives (especially again with the participation of external actors)—can itself turn into a "hybrid threat" and be abused by the government to suppress and silence opposition voices.
The Role of Civil Society
It is no secret that civil society organizations and the media in Armenia have played an important role for many years in monitoring electoral processes: they have recorded the main violations, collected facts, and created public pressure for fairer processes. Today, when the overwhelming majority of electoral violations have shifted from the polling station to the pre-election phase, detecting them has become significantly more difficult. The use of administrative resources, the imbalance of campaigning, or illegal financial flows require systematic monitoring, expert analysis, and rapid response. However, most NGOs are not engaged in monitoring pre-election processes, leaving the field to 1-2 specialized observation coalitions and investigative journalists, which, given the diversity of electoral challenges, may be insufficient. Civil society organizations specialized in various sectors should monitor and assess electoral processes from their sectoral perspective.
Decreased funding forces many organizations to operate more constrainedly. Existing funding mechanisms can lead to a situation where civil society organizations are more involved in voter awareness programs than in monitoring electoral processes. Furthermore, it is concerning when some civil society groups see themselves in the domain of campaigning. This is not about voter awareness or fighting disinformation, but about the promotion of so-called "values," the boundary of which with pre-election campaigning can be very subtle and, in a polarized electoral environment, can diminish already fragile credibility.
There is also an approach that the current situation should be considered sufficiently satisfactory against the backdrop of past large-scale electoral violations. But it is precisely the goal of strengthening and continuously developing the current, comparatively more free and transparent electoral processes that should oblige us to set and strive for higher standards.
Mariam Hoveyan
Head of Electoral Programs, Transparency International Anti-Corruption Center (TIAC)
The article was written as part of the Regional Center for Democracy and Security’s “Democratic Security for Armenia” project.