CDL-AD(2020)025 - 48 - election. Pursuant to provisional legal provisions, five members out of the fifteen-member boards of the electoral commissions at every level, as well as their chairmen, were either directly or indirectly appointed by the President of Georgia. In addition, at least one member of those electoral commissions was a representative of the President’s National Movement party, since the latter had won the earlier local elections in Tbilisi. Pro-presidential forces thus had a relative majority vis-à-vis the representatives of other political parties in electoral commissions at every level. The Court noted that, although there could be no ideal or uniform system to guarantee checks and balances between the different State powers within a body of electoral administration, a proportion of seven members out of fifteen-member electoral commissions, including the chairmen who had the casting votes and were appointed by the President of Georgia and his party, was particularly high in comparison to other legal orders in Europe. Furthermore, the Court observed that so long as the presidential party – the National Movement – was simultaneously running in the repeat parliamentary election, it was not implausible that other candidate parties, including the applicant party, might have been placed in an unfavourable position by the presidential majority in the electoral administration. The Government’s argument that, once appointed to office, the members of the electoral commissions had to quit their respective political parties or to suspend their membership, was not found reassuring in this regard. The Court was not convinced that a party’s representative to an electoral commission, whom that party has most likely nominated because of his or her loyalty to its values and discipline, would necessarily and immediately become an independent and impartially thinking civil servant just by virtue of filing a formal declaration to that end. The Court noted, however, that the applicant party did not submit any evidence that the presidential majority in the electoral commissions had misappropriated the votes cast in its favour or otherwise limited its rights and legitimate interests during the repeat parliamentary election. The Court held that it could not find a violation of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 solely on the basis of the allegation, no matter how plausible it was, that the system had created possibilities for electoral fraud; instead, the applicant party should have submitted evidence of specific incidents of alleged violations. The Court concluded that the contested composition of electoral commissions at all levels indeed had lacked sufficient checks and balances against the President’s power and that those commissions could hardly enjoy independence from the outside political pressure. However, in the absence of any proof of particular acts of abuse of power or electoral fraud committed within the electoral commissions to the applicant party’s detriment, no breach of the latter’s right to stand for election was established. (f) Sufficient reasoning of decisions and indication of a genuine effort to address the substance of arguable claims The authorities must make genuine effort to address the substance of arguable individual complaints concerning electoral irregularities and the relevant decisions must be sufficiently reasoned.200 Specific case: In the case of Namat Aliyev (cited above) the applicant complained that, in the electoral constituency where he stood as a candidate, there had been a number of serious irregularities which had made it impossible to determine the true opinion of voters and thus had infringed 200 See Namat Aliyev, cited above, §§ 76-93.