Georgian election: Hungary’s Orban swipes at EU and tells PM disputed vote was fine

President Zourabichvili had already told the BBC that so-called carousel voting had taken place, “when one person can vote 10, 15, 17 times with the same ID”.

My Vote has called for the results from 196 polling stations to be annulled, alleging that they accounted for an extra 300,000 votes.

Georgia’s prime minister has denied allegations of widespread irregularities, telling the BBC the elections were generally “in line with legal principles”. He has also denied that his government is pro-Russian and “pro-Putinist”.

Georgia’s beleaguered election commission has accused its critics of a “manipulative campaign” of disinformation and said it would recount votes in five randomly selected polling stations in each of Georgia’s 84 election districts.

The commission says the US company whose system it used maintained that “duplicating a voter on the voter list is impossible, external, as each voter is registered only once”.

“It is impossible to vote multiple times with a single ID, undergo double verification, or have a single voter registered across multiple precincts,” the commission added, adding that trying to discredit the system was no more than denying reality.

The Georgian president told Swiss radio that the commission was “completely dominated by the party of power, and non-government organisations… have no influence over it”.

“This state is captured,” said Eka Gigauri of Transparency International, which was involved in the My Vote monitoring mission.

“We know anything might happen… and we know no-one will investigate it or react.”