The ruling Georgian Dream party will suspend voting for Georgians abroad, a move the disputed Parliament Speaker, Shalva Papuashvili, said will “strengthen election resilience” against foreign interference, while critics fear it will effectively disenfranchise emigrants,
Civil Georgia reports.
During a November 17 briefing, Shalva Papuashvili announced a major overhaul of the country’s Electoral Code, including a change that would require voting in parliamentary elections, like in local elections, to take place only inside Georgia’s borders.
Papuashvili claimed the change is constitutional with respect to the state’s obligation to guarantee the free expression of the voter’s will, which, he said, “also implies that this will must be expressed free from external interference.”
Claiming that elections worldwide have become “increasingly vulnerable to external interference,” and referring to votes in the U.S. and EU member states, Papuashvili said Georgia’s 2024 general elections “clearly showed how open and blatant foreign informational and political pressure on voters can be.”
“In this regard, there are, of course, particularly high risks of influence on non-resident citizens, who are under the impact of a foreign jurisdiction and political environment where the Georgian state cannot prevent interference,” he said.
Papuashvili argued that non-resident citizens face heightened risks of “information manipulation,” saying they rely largely on “filtered information” from the media and lack the “unfiltered information, which a person gets from personal interaction with society or the state.” The two sources, he said, can be “radically contradictory.”
