22 THE GEORGIAN LABOUR PARTY v. GEORGIA JUDGMENT Notwithstanding the fact that violations took place in Khulo and Kobuleti districts, the decision to annul their results and call a repeat polling appeared inconsistent with the fact that major violations in other districts did not result in the annulling of the DEC results there. Moreover, the legal arguments used and legal basis were weak. The EOM believes that Article 105 § 12 relates to majoritarian elections rather than the proportional contest. The citing of this article rather than Article 105 § 16 (which specifically mentions its applicability to proportional elections) raises the question as to whether Georgia is a single electoral unit for the proportional election or seventyfive ‘fragments’. This issue is not adequately defined in the EC. ... Should Article 105 § 16 be applied, then elections should also be repeated elsewhere, as more than 10% of voters within a district were affected by the annulling of results. Thus, it appeared that the CEC adopted different and legally questionable procedures just for these two districts. [Election observers] appealed the CEC decision to invalidate the election results and to set repeat elections in Khulo and Kobuleti. In the course of the hearing it became apparent that CEC Order 82/2004 was based on a questionable decision-making procedure. The CEC could not prove that it made the decision to annul the district results on a PEC-by-PEC basis. The Tbilisi District Court upheld the CEC decision and challenged the election observers’ authority to bring the case. The court decided that their appeals were [in]admissible because their legitimate rights or interests were not damaged. [The observers] appealed this decision at the Supreme Court, that ruled against [them] in a closed session. The decision to dismiss the case, based on the plaintiffs not having the legal right to appeal, was highly questionable. The EC does not clearly state that observers can appeal a CEC decision to invalidate the DEC results since there is no provision in the EC that the CEC can overrule a DEC in such cases. Consequently, the decision of the CEC had to be questioned, not the rights of observers. The dismissal of such an important and well-founded case ... contributed to the impression that the [electoral] law was applied in a non-transparent and inconsistent manner.” IV. COMPARATIVE LAW A. Systems for voter registration in Europe (Working Documents of the French Senate, Comparative Legislation Series, March 2006) 54. In one of its working documents, the French Senate examined the systems of voter registration in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. 55. With the exception of Portugal and the United Kingdom, the initial registration of voters and subsequent amendments to the electoral rolls in these States are automatically carried out by the authorities on the basis of mandatory domiciliary declarations by the population. 56. In Portugal, the compilation and modification of electoral rolls depend on the voters’ individual requests to that end. Portuguese law even