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More than 70 percent of voters found their names and cast votes Tuesday (officially).

However, few would predict that the voter activity would beat all expectations to stand at roughly the same level (or even exceed) that Armenians registered when they elected their first president (incidentally Ter-Petrosyan) in October 1991 – after decades of having been deprived of a real democratic election by Soviet rulers. (Queues at polling stations were observed all over the former Communist bloc countries in the early 90s).

According to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), about 1.7 out of some 2.3 million Armenians eligible to vote went to the polls on Tuesday (data is from 1,913 out of 1,923 polling stations) - or more than 70 percent.

(To compare, in the 1996 presidential election the voter turnout was 55 percent, in 1998 – 68 percent, and in 2003 – 61 percent).

But: allegations of inflating voter turnout figures have always dogged Armenian elections perhaps with the exception of those in 1991. Some anecdotal evidence in the 2003 presidential election suggested that in several polling stations the voter turnout proved to be higher than 100 percent – after some data tampering of course, but it was quickly fixed later.

After the announcement of the voter turnout figure by the CEC, the opposition immediately reacted claiming that the authorities had grossly inflated the figure. Ter-Petrosyan campaign manager Alexander Arzumanyan and activist Nikol Pashinyan, in particular, accused the authorities of inflating the turnout by a staggering 500,000. (It may be worth noting that Pashinyan’s own math skills may be questionable, as it was he who frequently reported LTP rally turnout at astronomically exaggerated numbers.)

Claims like these, however, have been denied by the pro-government majority and in particular by the Republican Party of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, who has emerged as an outright winner in the Feb. 19 presidential polls.

Still during the tense race ahead of the election, presidential candidate Arman Melikyan turned to the Constitutional Court demanding that some 500,000 citizens of Armenia currently staying or working outside the country be reinstated in the voting rights (according to the amended Armenian election code, only citizens physically present in the territory of the country are allowed to vote).

So, if we do the math and extract some 500,000 from the 600,000 people who did not go to the polls, it will turn out that only 100,000 Armenians actually did not participate in the 2008 presidential election – a result that closely compares with countries like Australia or Brazil where going to the polls is compulsory by law.