1. Every File Remembers Who Touched It
FORENSIC METADATA 821 FILES ANALYZED
Every time you save an Excel file, Word document, or PDF, your computer records invisible information inside the file. This is called metadata. It typically includes the name of the person who created the file, the name of the person who last modified it, the software used, and sometimes the name of the computer it was saved on.
You do not see this information when you open the file normally. But it is there. And it does not lie.
OWL recovered 821 official election files from elections.am -- the official website of Armenia's Central Election Commission (CEC) -- using the Wayback Machine. These are not leaked files. They are not opposition research. They are the CEC's own official publications, archived by the Internet Archive while they were still hosted on the government website.
We extracted the metadata from every single one of those 821 files. Author. Creator. LastModifiedBy. Company. Computer name. Every field the files recorded about the people who handled them.
One name appeared in 591 of the 821 files.
2. The Metadata Fingerprint
CEC OFFICIAL FILES WAYBACK MACHINE ARCHIVED
Yelena Ayvazyan's name does not appear just once or twice. It appears under multiple metadata fields, in multiple naming variants, across hundreds of files. Here is the complete breakdown:
| Metadata Field | Username Variant | File Count |
|---|---|---|
| LastModifiedBy | Yelena Ayvazyan | 272 |
| Creator | Yelena | 237 |
| LastModifiedBy | Ayvazyan Yelena | 120 |
| LastModifiedBy | AVV | 98 |
| Author | Yelena | 82 |
| Creator | Yelena Ayvazyan | 81 |
| LastModifiedBy | Yelena | 75 |
| Author | Yelena Ayvazyan | 69 |
| Creator | yelenaa | 40 |
| TOTAL FILE TOUCHES | 591+ | |
Note the variants. "Yelena Ayvazyan." "Ayvazyan Yelena" (surname first -- common in Armenian administrative contexts). Just "Yelena." The Windows username "yelenaa." And "AVV" -- likely either her initials in a different transliteration or a shared workstation account. All of these appear consistently across files that are confirmed CEC publications.
Many of these files also carry the Company metadata field set to "CEC" -- 313 files in total -- confirming they were created on Central Election Commission computers.
The metadata is not something Yelena Ayvazyan chose to include. It is recorded automatically by Microsoft Office every time a file is created, edited, or saved. It cannot be faked retroactively without specialized forensic tools -- tools that no CEC employee would have reason to use on routine election spreadsheets.
3. Everyone Else Combined
CONCENTRATION ANALYSIS ANOMALOUS PATTERN
The CEC is not a one-person office. It is the institution responsible for administering elections for an entire country of nearly three million people. So who else appears in the metadata?
| CEC Staff Member | Files Touched | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Yelena Ayvazyan | 591 | 72.0% |
| Tatevik Gevorgyan | 44 | 5.4% |
| Meline Davtyan | 28 | 3.4% |
| Sedanna Margaryan | 14 | 1.7% |
| Garegin Ayvazyan | 11 | 1.3% |
| Svetik Grigoryan | 10 | 1.2% |
| Hasmik Zeynalyan | 3 | 0.4% |
| Others (5 staff, 1-2 files each) | ~8 | ~1.0% |
| Unattributed / other metadata | ~112 | ~13.6% |
| TOTAL | 821 | 100% |
Look at the distribution. One person handles 591 files. The next most active person handles 44. That is a ratio of more than 13 to 1. The second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh most active staff members combined account for 110 files -- still less than one-fifth of Yelena Ayvazyan's total.
Imagine a bank where one teller processed 72% of all transactions for nine years straight. No rotation. No second pair of eyes. No segregation of duties. Any auditor would flag this immediately -- not because the teller is necessarily doing something wrong, but because the absence of controls makes it impossible to know whether anything wrong is happening. That is exactly the situation at Armenia's Central Election Commission.
4. The Same Surname Question
REQUIRES INVESTIGATION
There is another name in the metadata: Garegin Ayvazyan. Eleven files.
Ayvazyan is not the most common Armenian surname. Two people named Ayvazyan working at the same institution -- the Central Election Commission -- handling the same type of election data files, is worth noting.
We do not know the relationship between Yelena and Garegin Ayvazyan. They may be related. They may not be. Armenian institutions sometimes employ members of the same family, and this is not illegal.
But the question must be asked: if they are family members, then a single family's fingerprints appear on 602 out of 821 CEC files -- 73%. In any institution handling sensitive public data, the presence of family members in the same data pipeline would require disclosure and additional oversight. Whether such oversight exists at the CEC is unknown.
Yelena Ayvazyan (591 files) and Garegin Ayvazyan (11 files) share a surname and both appear in CEC election file metadata. The nature of their relationship, if any, is not established. But combined, the name "Ayvazyan" appears in 602 of 821 files -- 73% of all CEC election data.
5. SHTAB4 -- The Workstation
EXCEL COMMENT METADATA CEC ORIGIN CONFIRMED
Some of the Excel files contain comments -- notes left by editors inside spreadsheet cells. These comments record the computer name of the machine that created them.
The computer name that appears: SHTAB4.
"Shtab" is the Russian word for "headquarters" or "operations center" (from the military term). The number 4 indicates it is workstation number four. So the CEC's election data was being processed on a machine literally named "Headquarters Workstation 4" -- a computer inside the CEC's operations room.
This confirms what the "Company: CEC" metadata already tells us: these files were created and edited on Central Election Commission computers, by Central Election Commission staff, as part of official CEC operations. There is no ambiguity about the origin of these files or the identity of the people who handled them.
Computer name "SHTAB4" (Headquarters Workstation #4) appears in Excel comment metadata. Combined with the "CEC" company field in 313 files, this establishes beyond doubt that these files were created inside the Central Election Commission's operations room.
6. Why One Person Controlling 72% Is a Problem
SYSTEMIC RISK
This is not an accusation against Yelena Ayvazyan personally. We do not know her. We do not know whether she has acted improperly. What we know is the structure -- and the structure is broken.
In any organization that handles sensitive data, a basic principle applies: separation of duties. No single person should control an entire data pipeline from creation to final publication. This is not a suggestion. It is a foundational rule of data integrity, required by every international standard for election administration.
Here is what the metadata tells us about the CEC's data pipeline:
- Creator: Yelena Ayvazyan created the files (237 + 81 + 40 = 358 files as Creator)
- Author: She is recorded as the original author (82 + 69 = 151 files as Author)
- LastModifiedBy: She made the final edits before publication (272 + 120 + 75 + 98 = 565 files as LastModifiedBy)
One person creates the file. The same person is the author. The same person makes the last edit before it goes public. That is not separation of duties. That is one person controlling the entire chain.
Consider what this means in practice:
- Single point of failure: If Yelena Ayvazyan made a data entry error, there was nobody to catch it. If a formula was wrong, nobody reviewed it. If a number was changed, nobody would know.
- Single point of manipulation: If anyone wanted to alter election data -- whether Ayvazyan herself or someone directing her -- the structure allowed it. One person, one workstation, no independent verification.
- Nine years of continuity: This is not a temporary staffing gap. The metadata spans from 2012 to 2021 -- at least five election cycles. The same person, the same concentration, the same absence of controls, year after year.
The Central Election Commission's data pipeline has no meaningful separation of duties. One person controlled the creation, editing, and finalization of 72% of all election data files for nearly a decade. This structure makes fraud undetectable -- not because fraud occurred, but because the system is designed in a way that would make it invisible if it did.
7. The Connection: 98% vs 53%
CROSS-REFERENCED LINKED TO PRIOR FINDING
In a previous OWL investigation, we documented that the CEC's official results file for the April 2, 2017 parliamentary election contains two contradictory datasets: the aggregate sheet claims 98% voter turnout, while the constituency-level breakdowns show 53%. The gap represents approximately 2.2 million phantom votes.
That file -- resulteng02.04.17.xlsx -- was created and published by the same CEC office, on the same infrastructure, during the same period covered by Yelena Ayvazyan's metadata footprint.
The question writes itself: was that file one of the 591?
The metadata concentration documented in this investigation does not prove that Yelena Ayvazyan personally created the 98% vs 53% discrepancy. But it establishes something equally important: the CEC's data environment was one where a single person could create, edit, and publish election files without independent review. In that environment, a 2.2 million vote discrepancy sat in an official file on a government website, apparently without anyone noticing.
That is not a coincidence. It is a consequence. When one person controls 72% of the data pipeline with no separation of duties, errors -- and manipulations -- go unchecked.
The same CEC data environment that allowed one person to control 72% of election files also produced a file containing 2.2 million phantom votes. The absence of independent review that enabled the concentration is the same absence that allowed the discrepancy to be published unchallenged.
8. What International Standards Require
OSCE / VENICE COMMISSION
The OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) and the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe both publish guidelines for election administration. Armenia is a member of both organizations and has committed to their standards.
These standards consistently require:
- Multi-person verification of election results data before publication
- Separation of duties in data handling -- the person who enters data should not be the same person who finalizes and publishes it
- Audit trails showing who accessed and modified election data
- Regular rotation of staff in sensitive positions to prevent entrenchment
The metadata from 821 CEC files shows that none of these requirements were met. One person created, edited, and finalized the majority of files. No rotation occurred over nine years. The only "audit trail" that exists is the one we extracted from the metadata that the CEC apparently never intended anyone to read.
9. June 7, 2026: Will the Same Person Control the Data?
ONGOING RISK
Armenia's next parliamentary election is scheduled for June 7, 2026. It is 58 days away.
The Central Election Commission has not announced any structural reform of its data handling procedures. No independent audit of the CEC's internal controls has been published. No separation-of-duties policy has been disclosed.
The questions that voters, observers, and international partners should be asking:
- Is Yelena Ayvazyan still at the CEC? If yes, will the same single-person data pipeline be used for the 2026 election?
- Has the CEC implemented separation of duties? Will multiple independent staff members create, verify, and publish election data -- or will one person still control the pipeline?
- Will the CEC strip metadata before publication? Now that this analysis is public, will the CEC simply remove metadata from future files -- eliminating transparency rather than fixing the underlying problem?
- Will international observers audit the data pipeline? OSCE election observation missions typically focus on polling day. They rarely examine how digital election data is created, edited, and published at the CEC headquarters. This investigation shows that is where the real vulnerability lies.
The 2026 election will be administered by the same institution, using the same infrastructure, with no announced reforms to data handling. Unless the CEC publicly demonstrates that it has implemented separation of duties and independent verification, voters have no reason to believe the same structural failures documented here will not repeat.
10. Methodology
This investigation is based on the following steps:
- File recovery: 821 files were recovered from elections.am using the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org). These include Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx), Word documents (.doc, .docx), and PDFs published by the CEC across multiple election cycles from 2012 to 2021.
- Metadata extraction: Standard forensic tools were used to extract embedded metadata from each file, including Author, Creator, LastModifiedBy, Company, and computer name fields.
- Attribution analysis: Metadata values were grouped by likely individual (accounting for name variants such as "Yelena Ayvazyan," "Ayvazyan Yelena," "Yelena," and "yelenaa") and counted.
- Cross-referencing: The Company field ("CEC") and computer name field ("SHTAB4") were used to confirm institutional origin.
No files were altered during analysis. The metadata extraction process is read-only and does not modify the original files. Any person with the same set of files and a metadata extraction tool can reproduce these results.