Marine Martirosyan
Hrant Galstyan

178 residents are registered at one address located on the voter rolls posted at the 26/27 polling station in the Kotayk Province village of Kasakh.

Local election commission president Ashkhen Hovhannisyan is at a loss to explain why.

“I’m just the commission president. What do I know,” she told Hetq.

Hovhannisyan represents the ruling Republican Party of Armenia which has backed the referendum on changing the country’s constitution.

Residents of the building where 178 people are registered at apartment number 11, say that the addresses had been changed and that such an apartment no longer exists.

Kasakh village mayor Ara Mkrtchyan told Hetq that the municipality had made up an address for all the community’s residents who had, over the years, sold their property but are still regarded as residents.

“We made up an address, but it has no owner,” said Mkrtchyan, who had difficulty specifying how many people had been registered at the same address in the last election. He claimed that the municipality had such information but it was closed today, Sunday.

Narek Mkrtchyan, president of the 26/29 polling station’s commission, told Hetq that the problem goes back ten years.

He said that a few years ago some 300 people were registered there and that local authorities had slowly weeded out some names.

“There are people included in the list that are permanently absent. We clean the list to the maximum and tell them to register where they are currently living,” said Narek Mkrtchyan, a nephew of the mayor.

He added that they cannot legally remove people from the list since they must have a residency address.