Summary
Romania’s Constitutional Court has ordered a recount of the November 24 presidential election after far-right candidate Calin Georgescu unexpectedly won the first round, despite polling below 5% beforehand.
Georgescu, critical of NATO and supportive of Russia’s Putin, will face centrist Elena Lasconi in a December 8 runoff.
The court rejected an application to annul the election, citing a missed deadline.
The decision comes amid reports of cyberattacks and allegations of TikTok of favoring the far-right candidate.
For people who don’t know, this is very, very bad. The recount isn’t actually because of the far right lunatic but because a reasonable person with good ideas beat the corrupt ruling party candidate for second place very narrowly. This recount is basically a transparent ploy to shove the corrupt establishment candidate through to the second round
And pushing the corrupt guy to the second place will give the far-right guy pretty much a free pass to the presidency.
Huh, sounds kinda familiar…
There’s an ongoing theory that the corrupt guy might want this to happen indeed. See, the presidency in Romania isn’t as important as it is in the US. We’re a parliamentary republic, which means that parties need to form a coalition so that they can vote in a government. There are some hints pointing in the direction that the corrupt guy might try to hijack the elections so that the far-right guy gets the presidency. This in turn would mean that the corrupt guy’s party can form a coalition government with the far-right parties and thus get elected as prime minister. It’s easier for them to govern with the far-right than with the progressives or center parties.
Huh, that also sounds familiar…
Tbh, recounts should always be mandatory regardless of who wins or by how much. It’s silly to assume there isn’t election interference going on in our day and age, and I doubt only one country is doing it either.
Recounts generally only correct for errors in vote counting - if different systems are used (i.e. electronic tally for initial count and by hand for recount) where one is cheaper and faster and the other is more expensive and more precise then it makes sense to trigger automatically if the vote is close enough that error could account for a swing.
However, recounting using the same system will result in the same outcome (varied by whatever amount of error is inherent in that counting system) with the single exception being suspected interference in the counting process.
If, for instance, there’s a municipality suspected to be staffed by pro-Russian bureaucrats then it makes to recount the result using trusted actors as a way to remove possible error.
Mandatory recounts with the same system and participants don’t get us anything particularly meaningful.
I am confused. Is the concern that the vote counting process was compromised or that voters were unduly swayed before the election?
I’ve heard grumbling about the latter (especially regarding TikTok) but a recount wouldn’t remedy that.
I don’t know details, but the nr 2 and 3 were extremely close. Since there will be a runoff between the nr1 and 2, a recount makes sense.
The difference between 2nd and 3rd candidates is 2000 votes. There were 9 million votes in total. That’s insanely close. There is widespread fear that during the recount some votes will be nullified, and some will be changed in some god forsaken villages, resulting in an overturn (which will result in a re-election according to the constitution).
Candidate #1 is a pro russian fascist. #2 is progressive pro-european. #3 is just very corrupt and made a lot of people angry. If #1 goes against #2 in the second round, #2 has a decent chance of winning. #1 against #3 would be really bad, like having to choose between hitler and trump.
Thank you for giving us the background to better understand!
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