How is annulling an election any different from their power to invalidate results?
The power cited to ensure election procedure doesn't seem vague. It appears to be quite broad:
> The Constitutional Court shall have the following powers: ... (f) to guard the observance of the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and to confirm the ballot returns;
For the ballot returns, there is a whole law that details how that process works, what documents are to be sent to the court, who and how and when can contest the results, what happens if the results are annulled and so on. The court can't make up its own rules, there is a whole legislative cadre that specifies their powers, responsibilities, and their interaction with other institutions.
They trampled over all of these with this new decision: they didn't observe any time limits (they gave this decision out of the blue, while the voting for the second round had already started; could they have decided this same annulment two months from now? Nothing in this decision or motivation says they couldn't). They met to decide on this matter with no request from everyone, they brought this matter before themselves by their own power, which no court has the power to. They had no legal framework to demand this from any other institution.
Worse of all, they have specified no limits to this broad power they have found they have, nor any legal standards for what type of allegations are grave enough to objectively determine this annulment. What if next time a candidate that won 1% of the vote had a suspicious campaign, will that lead to annulment? What is the standard of evidence to be evaluated for this decision? The documents they based this decision on wouldn't even have constituted admissible evidence in a court of law, they are hearsay by institutions which aren't even making them under pain of perjury.
And related to that article of the Constitution, there is no reason to interpret it as a broad, decisional power. It is clearly meant to guide law makers to create specific laws for determining the CCR's specific role in the electoral process. There are many similar articles in the constitution about other institutions that don't grant them any direct powers in this way. For example, article 80, title 2 says:
> (2) The President of Romania shall guard the observance of the Constitution and the proper functioning of the public authorities. To this effect, he shall act as a mediator between the Powers in the State, as well as between the State and society.
If the President took the same approach as the court, it stands to reason that he could go into any public authority in Romania and block their decisions based on finding that they are not properly observing the Constitution, right?
> If the President took the same approach as the court, it stands to reason that he could go into any public authority in Romania and block their decisions based on finding that they are not properly observing the Constitution, right?
No. Article 80 you're quoting does not grant the President power. Instead it describes the role of President.
This is rather unlike Article 146 that explicitly grants the Constitutional Court power or the other articles that explicitly grant the President power.
The power cited to ensure election procedure doesn't seem vague. It appears to be quite broad:
> The Constitutional Court shall have the following powers: ... (f) to guard the observance of the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and to confirm the ballot returns;