- 51 - CDL-AD(2020)025 applicants had been registered so late and so close to election day that they had not had a reasonable amount of time to conduct effective electoral campaigns. The late registration had been due to a lack of safeguards against arbitrariness in the candidate registration procedures and to delays in the examination of their appeals by the electoral authorities and courts. In such circumstances, the applicants’ individual electoral rights had been curtailed to such an extent as to significantly impair their effectiveness. (i) Concern for integrity of the electoral process In fulfilling their duties, electoral authorities and courts must demonstrate concern for integrity of the electoral process.203 Specific case: In Kerimova v. Azerbaijan (no. 20799/06, 30 September 2010) the applicant, who had stood as an opposition candidate in the November 2005 parliamentary elections, complained about arbitrary invalidation of election results in her constituency and ineffectiveness of judicial review. She received the largest number of votes in her constituency, having obtained 5,566 votes as compared to the 3,922 votes cast in respect of a candidate from the ruling political party, who came second. Following the official tabulation of the results the next day, she featured in the electoral protocol as “the elected candidate”. On 8 November 2005 the CEC invalidated the election results in the applicant’s constituency after finding that the protocols had been tampered with making it impossible to determine the will of the voters. The applicant appealed, arguing that the changes in the protocols had in effect reduced the number of votes recorded in her favour and had increased those cast in favour of the candidate immediately after her and that she remained the winner despite the changes. Her appeals were unsuccessful. In the meantime, two election officials were convicted of having falsified the election results in the applicant’s constituency, for the benefit of other candidates. The Court observed that, even despite the fact that the irregularities had been made in an attempt to inflate the number of votes for the applicant’s opponents, the election results had still showed the applicant as a clear winner. Yet in their decision to invalidate the results, the election authorities had not given any reasons to explain why the alleged breaches had altered the outcome of the elections. Nor had they even considered the possibility of recounting the votes once the irregularities had been established. Furthermore, the Electoral Code prohibited the invalidation of election results at any level on the basis of a finding of irregularities committed for the benefit of candidates who lost the election. However, neither the electoral authorities, nor the domestic courts had endeavoured to determine in whose favour the alleged irregularities had worked. Despite the fact that the applicant had repeatedly raised these points in her appeals, the domestic courts had failed to adequately address them. Nor had they examined any primary evidence. The examination of the applicant’s appeals was therefore ineffective. As a result, the authorities’ inadequate approach brought about a situation where the election process in the entire electoral constituency was single-handedly sabotaged by two electoral officials who had abused their position by making changes to a number of election protocols. By arbitrarily invalidating the election results because of those officials’ actions, the national authorities essentially helped them to obstruct the election. Consequently, the decision to invalidate the election was unsubstantiated and was in apparent breach of the procedure established by the domestic electoral law. This decision arbitrarily infringed the applicant’s electoral rights by depriving her of the benefit of election to Parliament. It also showed a lack 203 See Kerimova v. Azerbaijan, no. 20799/06, § 53, 30 September 2010.