32 THE GEORGIAN LABOUR PARTY v. GEORGIA JUDGMENT C. Composition of the electoral commissions 1. The Government’s submissions 94. The Government submitted that the provisional rules on the composition of the electoral commissions – Articles 128, 128(1) and 128(2) of the EC – had not been introduced on the eve of the repeat parliamentary election but on 5 August 2003, that is even before the regularly scheduled parliamentary election of 2 November 2003. They pointed to the fact that the applicant party had been satisfied with those rules pending the scheduled parliamentary and presidential elections, and had complained only after the finalisation of the legitimate but unfavourable results of the repeat parliamentary election. 95. The Government argued that Article 18 § 3 of the EC provided a sufficient guarantee to secure the independence and impartiality of the electoral administration. Thus, although the candidates for membership of electoral commissions were representatives of political parties, they were obliged, under the above-mentioned provision, to quit their respective parties once appointed to office. 96. Lastly, the Government submitted that the applicant party had not shown any real evidence or referred to specific facts in support of its allegations that the electoral commissions had either lacked independence or impartiality, or that its representatives had been illegally hampered from properly fulfilling their administrative duties. As to the composition of the electoral administration itself, the Government stressed that the respondent State should be granted a particularly wide margin of appreciation in this respect. 2. The applicant party’s submissions 97. The applicant party acknowledged that the disputed provisional rules on the composition of electoral commissions, whereby the President of Georgia was entitled to appoint five out of fifteen members of the CEC, had been adopted prior to the regularly scheduled parliamentary election of 2 November 2003. However, under another important amendment made on 28 November 2003, that is immediately after the “Rose Revolution” and specifically for the purposes of the repeat parliamentary election of 28 March 2004, the chairman of the CEC was also to be appointed by the President. The President thus gained the right to nominate directly six out of the fifteen CEC members, including the Chairman, while another two members were representatives of a pro-presidential party. Moreover, the composition of the DECs and PECs was similar to that of the CEC. 98. Such a composition of electoral commissions at all levels established, in the applicant party’s view, a plethora of possibilities for electoral fraud. The applicant party alleged that its representatives had been