2008 Presidential Election Campaign Sites

Although Internet penetration in Armenia is quite low compared to the West, more and more domain names are being registered and many opposition media outlets now depend on an online presence to get their message out. In recent years international donors have even funded government web sites in the hope of increasing transparency and promoting the rule of law.

Last year’s parliamentary election was also quite notable in that many political parties started to use the Internet to appeal to voters and, as The Armenian Observer notes, that tendency looks set to continue for next month’s presidential election in Armenia.

Vigorous politicisation of the Armenian section of Internet is observed as the February 19 Presidential elections draw near. A number of official websites endorsing different candidates have been launched. Already there are websites for Levon Ter-Petrossian, Vazgen Manukyan, Vahan Hovhannisyan and Artur Baghdasaryan. Sections related to the elections have appeared in the websites of Republican Party of Armenia, Prosperous Armenia/ Bargavach Hayastan and United Liberal National Party/MIAK parties.

Passport and invitations department at RA police has presented the list of Armenian voters based on polling stations to the Central Electoral Commission, which has been placed in the Central Electoral Commission’s website, and as was the case with the previous elections, every Internet connected voter may check their names in the list and find out which polling station they will be voting, and where that particular station is located. By the way, 2 311 917 voters were registered this time, which is 5 983 less then the previous - May 12, 2007 Parliamentary elections.

A range of information websites dedicated to the upcoming elections have been launched, including the http://elections.a1plus.am/ of A1plus, http://www.echannel.am - by Internews Armenia and http://www.elections2008.am - by MediaMax News Agency.

It doesn’t look as though we’ve yet got to the stage of seeing candidates actually blog, but I should imagine it won’t be long. Certainly, most of the candidates appear to be taking their online presence seriously although it remains to be seen how many people will actually access the sites. Unfortunately, it appears as though none of the official campaign sites are using Google Analytics and only Vazgen Manukian’s has a visible counter.

Kudos to his team for that and bringing a little bit more transparency into proceedings, and as I’m tipping my hat to them, congratulations to Serzh Sarkisian’s campaign team for the best looking site, and to Levon Ter Petrosian’s people for being the first to use the Internet effectively to get their message out. On that, it’s probably worth also congratulating H for setting up the first albeit unofficial campaign web site, LevonForPresident.com, in September.

Anyway, in alphabetical order and although not all of them are fully up and running, here are the official web sites that we know about so far. Interestingly, all but Vahan Hovannisian’s site are available in Armenian, English and Russian.

Artur Baghdasarian
http://www.arturpresident.am/

Vahan Hovannisian
http://www.vahanpresident.am/

Vazgen Manukian
http://www.vazgenmanukyan.am/

Serzh Sarkisian
http://www.sergesargsyan.am/

Levon Ter Petrosian
http://www.levonpresident.am/

Photo: © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007