Tbilisi. Transparency International Georgia and International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy publishes the joint survey: State Resources at the Service of the Ruling Party: Proven Methods of Vote Buying and Illegal Mobilization of Voters in Georgia.

The organizations studied the documents allegedly taken from the correspondence of securgd@gmail.com during 2018-2019. This email address was allegedly created by the ruling party - Georgian Dream. The files provided by the whistleblower also included some documents from 2020. Certain data in the documents were verified through public information.

“Based on the research, a large-scale scheme of mobilizing voters in favor of the ruling party by illegal means was identified, which is highly likely to prove the use of state agencies (including law enforcement agencies) for election/party purposes. Personal information about employees of budgetary organizations and other citizens was probably collected through these agencies, to put pressure on them in the future. In addition, in exchange for support in the elections, citizens were provided with pre-requested and other types of benefits through various state agencies.

The scale of the scheme allows us to assume that as a result of interfering in the election process with these methods, it was possible to mobilize voters in favor of the ruling party on a large scale”.

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Source: isfed.ge