Women’s self-withdrawals in local elections. What are the reasons? 

Voting in the December 5 local elections is over. The final results of the voting were summed up on December 12. The mandates of the Council of Elders will be distributed in the near future, the first sessions of the newly elected Councils of Elders will take place.

WomenNet.am examined the data published by the Central Electoral Commission on the withdrawal of documents before the registration of candidates and the self-withdrawals announced before the voting, and revealed remarkable phenomena in which the legal guarantees do not work in terms of maintaining the quota in the elected body.

In the December 5 local elections, a total of 4,357 candidates were nominated by 44 political forces, of which 1,477 or 33.2% were women.

Before the registration, 168 candidates withdrew their documents or withdrew within the deadline, 81 of them were women. This includes 5 candidates whose registration has been declared invalid or rejected. There were no women among them.

Before the registration, 43 candidates withdrew their documents, 21 of them are women.

Many women candidates withdrew from the race before registering.

WomenNet.am talked about the reasons with the representatives of the political forces nominated in Sevan.

  “There were no women among our supporters who wished to become members of the Council of Elders, and we did not violate the law, as the law also allowed the documents to be withdrawn before registration,” said Arman Hayrapetyan, chairman of the ARF Dashnaktsutyun. It should be noted that as a result, there will be no women members in the ARF faction of the Council of Elders.

According to the CEC, 120 of the registered candidates withdrew within the period defined by law, half of them – 60 – are women.

It should be noted that the OSCE / ODIHR observers sounded the alarm about women’s nominations in the Armenian elections in their final report on the December 9, 2018 parliamentary elections. The authors of the report noted this, noting that while 32% of the total number of candidates were women, the representation of women in the newly elected parliament was 24%.

It is obvious that the problem exists and has deepened in the case of local elections.

Full text in Armenian