KERIMOVA v. AZERBAIJAN JUDGMENT 11 including the manner of review of the outcome of elections and invalidation of election results (see Kovach v. Ukraine, no. 39424/02, § 55 et seq., ECHR 2008-...). 45. The Court has emphasised that it is important for the authorities in charge of electoral administration to function in a transparent manner and to maintain impartiality and independence from political manipulation (see The Georgian Labour Party v. Georgia, no. 9103/04, § 101, 8 July 2008), that the proceedings conducted by them be accompanied by minimum safeguards against arbitrariness and that their decisions are sufficiently reasoned (see, mutatis mutandis, Namat Aliyev, cited above, §§ 81-90, and Kovach, cited above, §§ 59-60). 46. The Government contended that the impugned decision on the invalidation of election results was aimed at protecting the free expression of the voters' opinion from illegal interference and ensuring that only the rightfully elected candidates represented the voters in the Parliament. However, the Court has doubts as to whether a practice of discounting all votes cast in an entire electoral constituency owing merely to the fact that irregularities have taken place in some polling stations, regardless of the extent of the irregularities and their impact on the outcome of the overall election results in the constituency, can necessarily be seen as pursuing a legitimate aim for the purposes of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 (compare, mutatis mutandis, Kovach, cited above, § 52). However, the Court is not required to take a final view on this issue in the light of its findings below. 47. It is sufficiently clear from the material available in the case file that, according to the copies of PEC protocols obtained by the applicant from each of the polling stations at the end of election day (before the incidents of tampering with protocols took place), the applicant received a total of 5,566 votes against H.'s 3,992 votes. According to the ConEC protocol issued on the basis of those PEC protocols, after some of those protocols had been tampered with, the applicant received 5,350 votes against H.'s 4,091 votes. Thus, it is obvious that the election results, as they stood both before and after the irregularities involving illegal alterations to protocols, showed that the applicant was the clear winner of the elections. Moreover, neither the CEC nor the domestic courts hearing appeals against its decision, nor the Sumgayit City Court, dealing with the criminal case concerning the irregularities in question, ever found that any of the illegal alterations had been made to assist the applicant's cause. On the contrary, it was found by the Sumgayit City Court that they had been made exclusively in favour of her opponents. Neither did the Government, in their observations, argue that the irregularities had been intended to benefit the applicant. Accordingly, even despite the fact that these irregularities had been made in an attempt to inflate her opponents' vote counts and decrease her vote count, the election results still showed the applicant as a clear winner. In such circumstances, the Court finds it hard to understand the electoral authorities' and the