The CEC announced the decision on Thursday night, provoking a storm of condemnation from the country’s main opposition groups that had already refused to recognize Civil Contract’s election victory. One of them, the Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK), has been battling to ensure its presence in the National Assembly, which would deny Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s party a 60 percent majority required for enacting key laws and installing senior law-enforcement officials and judges.
According to preliminary official results of the June 7 elections, the BHK lacked just a few dozen votes to pass a 4 percent threshold for gaining parliament seats. It claims to have recovered more than 200 votes as a result of ballot recounts and verifications of vote protocols conducted in recent days. The annulment of the vote results in the two rural precincts essentially offset those gains. The BHK garnered 213 votes there.
The opposition party led by businessman Gagik Tsarukian accused the CEC of stealing its badly needed votes that would translate into 5 seats in the 105-member parliament. The other major opposition contenders echoed the accusations.
“This … once again proves that the ongoing process has nothing to do with the idea of fair and transparent elections and calls into question the legitimacy of the entire election process,” said BHK spokeswoman Iveta Tonoyan.
Armenia - Prosperous Armenia Party leader Gagik Tsarukian campaigns in Syunik province, May 18, 2026.
The CEC did not immediately explain the controversial decision. Vahagn Aleksanian, the ruling party’s deputy chairman, attributed it to the fact that hundreds of Armenian army conscripts voted in the precincts after polls across the country supposedly closed at 8 p.m. on Sunday. Aleksanian argued that the opposition itself decried this fact as a serious violation of Armenian law.
Vahagn Hovakimian, a longtime Pashinian ally heading the CEC, as well as the chief of the Armenian army’s General Staff, Lieutenant-General Eduard Asrian, denied the violation earlier this week.
As of Friday afternoon, the CEC did not clarify whether its decision means that the parliamentary elections will be rerun in the two precincts. Environment Minister Hambardzum Matevosian, who is a also senior ruling party figure, said this is the course of action mandated by the Armenian Electoral Code.
“I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I know, when the results of a polling station are canceled, a rerun has to be called, according to the code,” Matevosian told journalists.
Some opposition representatives demanded a nationwide rerun of the polls, saying that vote results from the two polling stations affected the overall election outcome.
The CEC’s is due to release the final election results this Sunday. Its preliminary figures were rejected by the Armenian opposition as fraudulent even before its decision announced overnight.
According to them, Civil Contract won the elections with 49.8 percent of the vote. Billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s Strong Armenia bloc came in second with 23.3 percent, followed by former President Robert Kocharian’s Hayastan alliance (9.9 percent) and the BHK (3.996 percent). Strong Armenia and Hayastan plan to challenge these results in the Constitutional Court.