Imedi TV owner says OSCE/ODIHR report provides no evidence of election falsification

Irakli Rukhadze, the owner of Imedi TV company, on Wednesday dismissed the domestic opposition’s claims about the election fraud, citing the OSCE/ODIHR report and urging respect for democratic processes despite political disagreements.

In his remarks, Rukhadze noted that the OSCE/ODIHR report had not substantiated allegations such as the use of fraudulent ID cards or large-scale irregularities.

“There is nothing in the report about the use of someone else’s ID cards. ODIHR clearly states they had 25,000 observers, and there’s no mention of such irregularities”, Rukhadze said.

Rukhadze criticised opposition narratives that pivot from accusations of vote tampering to claims of procedural breaches.

“As for all the alleged methods of falsification that the President [Salome Zourabichvili] initially described - such as the so-called “carousel voting” - none of this is mentioned in the ODIHR report”, he noted.

Rukhadze pointed out the scale of alleged fraud - 400,000 falsified votes, or one in five ballots - arguing that such claims lack substantiation in the ODIHR report.

“Let me remind everyone that our opposition didn’t claim ‘I lost because someone was bribed, intimidated, or because Russia interfered’. Our opposition declared ‘I won’. They came out and said they had won. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but based on the figures presented by the two pollsters that conducted the exit polls, if we align those numbers with the Central Election Commission’s results, they would have had to rig not 300,000 votes, as everyone claims, but 400,000 votes. That’s one out of every five votes from a total of two million. I didn’t see any evidence of that in the document”, he continued.

Rukhadze also condemned actions he deems undemocratic, including calls for immediate elections, violent protests, and property destruction.

“Now, the conversation has shifted. It’s no longer about falsification but rather about some alleged breach of vote secrecy. I believe this has also been brought to court. And if the elections were not falsified and the Georgian Dream won, [it means] the people gave them the right to make decisions that don’t require a constitutional majority. You may dislike these decisions as an opposition voter or even as a Georgian Dream supporter, but that’s democracy. We elect them, and they have the right to implement certain policies. If we dislike their actions to a significant extent, we can protest peacefully and wait for the next municipal elections to make a change. That’s our right”, Rukhadze noted.

“What is not our right is saying ‘I don’t like this, so let’s hold new elections now’, or resorting to violence, throwing things, setting fires, storming shops, looting, and burning them down. That’s not democracy- it’s going against the rules of democratic governance. I may not have said everything I intended, but this conveys my overall sentiment”, he concluded.