14 HAJILI v. AZERBAIJAN JUDGMENT irregularities have taken place in some polling stations, without an attempt to establish in a diligent manner 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, and Kerimova, cited above, § 46). However, the Court is not required to take a final view on this issue in the light of its findings below. 53. Having regard to the decisions of the CEC and domestic courts in the present case, the Court considers that they were not in compliance with the requirements of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1, for essentially the same reasons as those in the Kerimova judgment. In particular, the Court notes the following. 54. As to the CEC decision of 12 November 2005 invalidating the election results in the applicant’s constituency (see paragraph 9 above), the Court notes that it contained no specific description of the alleged “impermissible alterations” made to the PEC results records or other “infringements of law”, no elaboration as to the nature of these “alterations” and “infringements”, and no reasons explaining as to why the alleged breaches obscured the outcome of the vote in the relevant polling stations and made it impossible to determine the true opinion of the voters. In these circumstances the Court cannot but note that the CEC decision was unsubstantiated. 55. Furthermore, the Court notes that, like in the Kerimova case, the CEC and the domestic courts failed to follow a number of procedural safeguards provided by the domestic electoral law, without explaining the reasons for that omission. Firstly, the CEC failed to consider the possibility of a recount of votes before invalidating the election results for the entire constituency. Even accepting the Government’s argument that under Azerbaijani law an election recount was optional (at the CEC’s discretion) and not mandatory, the Court considers that in the present case the CEC could have considered the possibility of a recount or at least explained the reasons for passing up this opportunity before deciding on an invalidation of the election results. Secondly, the Court notes that the domestic authorities ignored the requirements of Article 114.5 of the Electoral Code, which prohibited 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. Accordingly, it appears that according to this provision, prior to considering a decision to annul the election, the authorities first had to specify the total vote counts and determine in whose favour the alleged irregularities had been made. However, this has not been done in the present case. In the Court’s view, the authorities’ failure to order a recount of votes or to take into account the requirements of Article 114.5 of the Electoral Code, and the lack of any explanation for such failure, contributed to the