Update: Five parties elected to Armenia parliament -election commission

13/ 05/ 2007
RIA Novosti

YEREVAN, May 13 (RIA Novosti) - Five parties have been elected to Armenia's parliament, with the pro-presidential parties leading the polls, the ex-Soviet nation's election commission said Sunday.

The processing of 99.99% of ballot papers showed that the Republican Party led by Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisyan received 457,032 votes (33.8%), the pro-presidential Prosperous Armenia and Dashnatsutyun gained 204,043 (15.1%) and 177,192 (13.1%) votes, respectively, while the opposition parties Orinats Yerkir and Heritage won 95,256 (7%) and 80,890 (6%) votes, accordingly, the election commission said.

More than 2 million Armenians voted May 12 in Armenia's fourth elections since the South Caucasus country gained independence in 1991, with twenty-two parties and one election bloc running for 131 seats in the parliament.

However, opposition parties said the vote was falsified and affected the election results. Particularly, Orinats Yerkir said it intends to challenge the vote results in a court of law.

"There were large-scale violations in the process of voting and during the vote count. The intimidation of electors, the use of bribes and non-existent ballot papers, numerous breaches in the vote count and the distortion of real voting results give ground to question the legitimacy of elections," the party said in a statement.

Observers earlier said they had not registered any serious violations during the parliamentary elections.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.