"The election will be re-run, likely with closer oversight over systems and social media" Except the opinions have already been formed based on whatever false information they have been fed. So without providing "true" facts, the new votes won't change much.
But they have been provided with true facts: that the candidate is actually backed by Russia, and that the supposedly "true" facts that they were provided were in fact not true facts.
The election has still been influenced for sure, but it's a false statement to say that voters have no new information.
Do you have a reliable source for those facts? Because there’s a lot of newspaper articles and allegedly some report from the Romanian spooks and I wouldn’t call any of those facts.
If they have a trial and if they prove corruption then that’s fair and square. Right now we’re in the “journalists and rival politicians accuse” phase.
They weren't, the vote systems (which are manual, and were counted by ~150,000 people, representatives of the political parties, independent observers, and others) were verified and a successful recount was already carried out. If anything is clear, it is that the people's votes were correctly counted.
People are always going to be influenced, that's the whole point of political campaigns, to influence you to vote for them. If they claim Russia tried to influence the Romanian people, and that they did it successfully enough to have their chosen candidate win, I think that shows more a failure of the other candidates than anything. You can't just tell every country in the world: please don't interfere with our opinions!!! We want our people to only be influenced by ourselves!!!
I would love to see exactly what they claim Russia did to influence so many people to affect the result of the elections.
Last time they claimed this in the USA, it has been shown that the influence was actually widely blown out of proportion. The 2024 results seem to show that people would've voted the way they did anyway, and maybe even in larger numbers. There's very little evidence to the contrary.
> You can't just tell every country in the world: please don't interfere with our opinions!!! We want our people to only be influenced by ourselves!!!
You can indeed, and countries do indeed have laws governing this, as does Romania[1]. The sources of spending for electoral ads have to be very transparent, and adhere to various regulations, such as that foreign governments, institutions and companies cannot finance local elections.
International law always sanctioned a state's intervention in another state's affairs. In addition to this very well known fact by jurists, there is also recent works in the field contradicting your position.
"International law prohibits states from intervening in the internal and external affairs of
other states [...] as coercion-as-control, an action materially depriving the victim
state of its ability to control its sovereign choices. This may be done even through acts like
cyber operations that the victim state is entirely unaware of." [1]
> If anything is clear, it is that the people's votes were correctly counted.
No, that's not clear at all. There were numerous other cyberattacks on Romanian voting infrastructure, per other articles about this event [0][1]
From Reuters:
> The intelligence service also said login data for official Romanian election websites was published on Russian cybercrime platforms. It added that it had identified more than 85,000 cyberattacks that aimed to exploit system vulnerabilities.
It sounds like this is about a lot more than tiktok preferentially showing one candidate. There were also denial-of-service attacks that would have suppressed certain votes, unauthorized access to the voting systems, and more.
Perhaps the votes reported were all cast, i.e. not literal fabricated numbers, but that doesn't mean that they were cast by the person they were supposed to be cast by, or that votes for other candidates were all counted.
First of all, the main way Romanian elections work are based on manual counting of ballots, in the presence of representatives from all political parties and outside observers, filled in on paper forms signed by all who observed the count. Then all those paper forms are centralized at the district (județ) level, and then to the central electoral bureau. This is all done on hand, with paper forms, with numerous observers all along the process. There is a digital process based on scanning these paper forms, but that is only done to report partial results faster to the public (and the count only happens after the vote has ended everywhere in the country, so false information in the partial results can't influence other voters).
So, even if the digital systems had been entirely compromised and under Russian control, that wouldn't have mattered one iota for the final results. And even after all this, a full hand recount was carried out last week which found the same results, with very little difference and no doubt whatsoever that CG won more votes than any other candidate).
And even the news stories you shared, which are anyway irrelevant to the final paper results, have misunderstood what our authorities are saying. The part of the our secret services which handles the cybernetic parts of the election (named the STS, Special Tellecomunications Service) has been very explicit, both in public declarations and in the classified briefing they gave to the President, that there were no risks to the core infrastructure, and that checks have been made before, during, and after the elections to confirm this.
Interesting. I appreciate you taking the time to lay this out; as all I have to go off of is global news articles, if those misunderstand Romanian authorities, then I'm not getting good information.
So the annulation is indeed based purely on the social media algorithmic skew, then?
Edit: the motivation was just published [0], here is a translation of the most relevant part:
> In the present case, the Court notes that, according to the aforementioned "Information Notes", the main aspects imputed to the electoral process regarding the election of the President of Romania in 2024 are those regarding the manipulation of the vote of voters and the distortion of equal opportunities for electoral competitors, through the non-transparent use and in violation of electoral legislation of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in the conduct of the electoral campaign, as well as through the financing of the electoral campaign from undeclared sources, including online.
The court has not yet published the motivation of its decision (its expected to be published tonight), so we're not sure yet.
Still, given that the same court unanimously decided on Dec 2nd, after receiving the results of a full recount, that the vote was fair and that the first round was valid, it seems extremely unlikely that they would cast any doubt on the vote count today.
Also, all of the discussions in the local press are about Russian influence on the campaign process. This includes allegations of algorithmic skew by Tik Tok, allegations that Tik Tok ignored Romanian campaign laws that require electoral clips to proeminently show some registration numbers, of illegal contributions to CG's campaign (including foreign, probably Russian, financing), of foreign nationals (again, probably Russians) coordinating to spread his campaign on Tik Tok and other social media, etc. The Supreme Council for National Defense (CSAT) papers that were declassified that triggered this late decision by the court were mostly about this.
To my mind, all of these might well have been disqualifying before the election, but give that the people have voted for him fairly, even if manipulated through social media, it's absurd to cancel the entire process and restart it. Especially considering that this will move the elections to at least February or March, months past the regular end of the current President's term. Consider also the huge costs for redoing this whole election, which we as taxpayers will cover.
I will note that the campaign financing fraud allegation is almost self-evidently true itself - CG has filed in official papers that his campaign was run for 0 RON. The fact that the authorities who received these filings months ago were unable or unwilling to do anything about it is absurd. I still don't believe that canceling the entire process when it was two days away from finishing is an acceptable moment to right this.
There is nobody that is alleging the vote counts were illegitimate. Not the voters, not the courts, not the politicians. That allegation isn't even relevant to this discussion
As I mentioned in a different comment, there are other news articles about this event that imply illegitimate vote counts. Those are what I based my comment on. Another commenter pointed out that those are misleading.
Without reading news in Romanian it's difficult to get accurate information.
How would you vote if there was a chance your country was to become a Ukraine situation? Would having children influence that vote. Would that sort of thinking invalidate the votes. I dunno personally.
