Georgia’s government is currently shunned by much of Europe. An impression has taken hold that the country has slipped into authoritarian rule. Part of this image rests on the claim that the 2024 parliamentary election was stolen.
The strongest false narratives are often assembled from pieces of correct facts. That is what happened here. Let us look at how.
In the 2024 election, Georgian Dream, the ruling party since 2012, was returned to power with 54 percent of the popular vote. Opposition groups and foreign leaders cast doubt on the result, demanding that it be annulled and a new election held.
The basis for this demand was the impression that the vote had been rigged. That impression rested mainly on two pillars: an exit poll and a statistical pattern known as the “Russian tail”.
The first pillar was the HarrisX exit poll, commissioned by the opposition-linked channel Mtavari Arkhi. HarrisX later said the official results contained “statistically unexplainable” discrepancies involving at least 172,523 votes in 27 districts, or more than 8 percent of all votes cast. That claim was quickly reported by Georgian and international media, including Reuters.
But the exit polls didn’t show the same picture. Edison Research, commissioned by another opposition-leaning channel, Formula TV, put Georgian Dream at 41 percent, while the main opposition groups together stood at roughly the same level or somewhat ahead. Exit polls can be useful, but even under calmer circumstances, their results are unreliable. They depend on sampling, response rates, turnout assumptions and voter honesty. In a polarized country like Georgia, exit polls are wildly unreliable, because voters may fear social or political consequences. A point opposition leader and ex-President Salome Zourabichvili herself once argued.
In 2018, [Zourabichvili] said that social polls had always been an instrument for manipulation with public opinion. “It is better not to trust them. There is no scientific base behind figures,” [Zourabichvili] stated, as quoted by GPB’s Channel 1.
The second pillar looked more technical. A Tbilisi-based academic published a policy brief (“A Dozen Daggers: How Georgia’s 2024 Elections Were Systematically Rigged”). Its executive summary claimed there was “sufficient evidence” to conclude that the 2024 parliamentary election was systematically rigged and did not represent the will of the Georgian people.
But election scholars have long warned that similar patterns can also emerge from social pressure, conformity and patronage in tight-knit communities like those found in Georgia’s rural regions. The report did not merely say that the data contained anomalies, it claimed that those anomalies were sufficient grounds to draw a broad brush conclusion that the election was systematically rigged.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) amplified the rigging narrative. Authoritative commentators like Tom De Waal and international media then took up the claim. Soon, the “Russian tail” was no longer a statistical pattern, but proof. The usual moralizing took it from there, casting doubt on anyone who questioned the narrative.
Taking a step back
What do we know, then, about the 2024 election? Let us turn to the report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and its election monitoring service, ODIHR. That report was based on old-fashioned ground observation: people in polling stations, watching voting, counting and tabulation.
Judging from that report, the election in October, 2024, was not clean. Georgian Dream used incumbency, pressure, voter tracking and a hostile political environment to its advantage. It also benefited from its rhetoric of standing up to foreign pressure while portraying critical NGOs as collaborators. The OSCE/ODIHR report documented serious problems: intimidation, pressure on voters, compromised vote secrecy, overcrowding and procedural inconsistencies. Vote secrecy was potentially compromised in 24 percent of observations, and party representatives often recorded the voting process and tracked voters.
But evidence of pressure and intimidation is not the same as proof that the result was fabricated.
Still, voters in Georgia are justified in expecting a clean election. But context matters. If the 2024 election was so marred by irregularities that it justified annulling the result, would that same logic also apply to the previous elections? Has that even been suggested?
Let us look at the 2010 municipal elections. Those were held under Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement government, a government strongly aligned with Western capitals. The OSCE/ODIHR preliminary report said the elections marked “evident progress”. But it also documented classic election fraud. Observers reported 13 cases where ballot-box stuffing was strongly suggested. They also reported three cases of falsification of voter-list entries, results or protocols, seven cases of pre-signed protocols, and serious tabulation problems. One in five observed counts were assessed as bad or very bad, with significant procedural errors or omissions in more than a quarter of observed counts.
Ballot stuffing, falsified records and manipulated counts are what election fraud normally means. That is the image that sticks in people’s minds when they hear that an election was “rigged”.
This contrasts with what OSCE/ODIHR observers found in 2024: pressure, intimidation, voter tracking, compromised secrecy and an uneven playing field. These are serious obstacles to a functioning democracy. But the same report also says election day was “generally procedurally well-organized and administered in an orderly manner”, that voter identification and vote-counting devices were mostly operational, and that tabulation was positively assessed, although the checking of protocols was not always complete.
Foreign leaders did not suggest annulling the result of the 2010 municipal elections, despite that was closer to the classic definition of a rigged vote.
Why the double standard?
The answer lies with what we may call the Tbilisi truth machine: an assemblage of NGO staff, embassy-adjacent actors, political spin operators, friendly commentators and international media channels that work together, sometimes openly and sometimes by instinct, to massage facts into a compelling narrative for foreign consumption.
This does not make the 2024 election clean. It was not clean. Pressure was real. Voter tracking was real. Compromised secrecy was real. Georgian Dream should be held accountable for those abuses.
But the evidence does not show that the election was rigged in the way now widely implied. That is the fiction created by the Tbilisi truth machine.
