Exit polls prove parliamentary elections held in line with democratic standards

/By AzerNews/

By Aynur Karimova

Exit polls conducted among voters during the November 1 parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan both by local and foreign companies showed that the election was held in line with the democratic standards.

Bruno Jeanbart, the Vice President of the French Opinion Way Social Research Institute, told Secki-2015.az. Media center that no violation of election law was observed during the election.

The U.S. polling firm Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates, which also conducted exit poll on the Election Day in Azerbaijan, reported that the ruling New Azerbaijan Party was leading in the election with 74 percent of the vote.

An exit-poll was held during the parliamentary election among 7,000 voters at 1,053 polling stations of 118 electoral constituencies.

George Birnbaum, executive director at Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates, said during the press conference that according to the polling results, 65 candidates out of those who won at the election are the representatives of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party.

Twenty candidates out of those who won in the other 53 constituencies are independent nominees.

According to the poll, despite that 28 out of the winning candidates are members of the New Azerbaijan Party, they are self-nominated. Five winning candidates are members of other parties.

ELS Independent Research Center, which conducted exit poll at 118 constituencies among 165,000 respondents, reported that approximate voter turnout for 18.00 was 56.2 percent.

The Rey Monitoring Center also announced that the voter turnout at the voting process was high enough.

Rizvan Abbasov, the head of the center, said that exit poll was conducted in only ten polling stations, involving 7,000 voters of Baku and Sumgayit.

The data on the results of the parliamentary election from 5,056 polling stations in 125 electoral constituencies have already been presented to Azerbaijan’s Central Election Commission.

The CEC Information Center reported on November 2 that a total of 5,547 polling stations were operating in Azerbaijan, and 2,692,978 ballots have already been processed.

As many as 503 international observers from 40 organizations and over 66,000 local observers watched the parliamentary election in Azerbaijan.

This year some 767 candidates are running for 125 seats in the country’s supreme legislative body.