Agreed. You do your best to counter and mitigate this type of foreign influence, but once people have voted, they have voted. Once you start to rationalize "but they only voted this way because X", it will be tempting to expand X in a way that disenfranchises and disempowers citizens.
Funny enough, the EU is currently calling the election results in Georgia illegitimate because they passed a similar sort of law (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-georgias-foreign-agent-law...). This is not doing a good job of dispelling the accusation that the media now uses "democracy" as code for outcomes that are desirable for US globalists and their allies.
The Russian foreign agent law is used to attack the public personalities and NGOs, and have nothing in common with the Romanian Electoral Laws. Georgians are absolutely right to be scared.
Have you seen the proof, or are you repeating what was written by someone else? There is a big difference. I bet this is the usual "credible information from anonymous government sources".
They had to make a quick call, in my book they acted boldly, the risks of the alternative were greater. Everyone has time to cool down and think about it, and the candidate can win if he is good. In the last few days all new information has pointed in the opposite direction.
They sat on this info for almost three weeks. Doing it now discards so much money and effort invested by people working the election stations, the people in other countries that already voted, etc. Not to mention that it communicates to the everyone that their vote doesn't count if it's not for the right candidate. A vote made under wrong assumptions is still a vote cast democratically. In my opinion this late decision makes a mocking of a real democratic process.
It's also very likely to have the side-effect of destroying Mrs. Lasconi's chances at the presidency. Who do you think that the Georgescu voters will vote for now? Not her for sure. I bet there will be a Simion vs. Ciolacu battle next time, and there we'll go again with choosing the "lesser of the two evils".
On the second point I completely agree with you. She appears to be collateral damage at this point. Perhaps that will raise sympathy and she can get into the second round again.
Theres been a lot of kurfuffle about it and apparently even the other politicians think this court decision was too much.
Im not sure why and how this works, just saying that having Russia create 10 million fake accounts (that we know of) in a country of 19 million is clearly foreign interference.
>He took aid from Russia which is against Romanian law.
Funny that you know this, but the actual court decision that should show proof of this has yet to be released. Either you are spewing hearsay, are in the intelligence community and are sharing secret information or... you are lying.
Please, do link the so-far unreleased information that the court based its decision on. I'll wait.
>Agreed. You do your best to counter and mitigate this type of foreign influence, but once people have voted, they have voted. Once you start to rationalize "but they only voted this way because X", it will be tempting to expand X in a way that disenfranchises and disempowers citizens.
And you ignore the laws? You discover that the candidate do illegal stuff?
No, I'm taking a step back and saying that if the law provides for nullifying the election, it's a bad law. It's an even worse law if no due process is involved (i.e. "nothing has been proven against this candidate in court as of yet, but we're going to go ahead and nullify the election because he benefited from foreign interference, as far as we can tell based on what our intelligence services are telling us").
For what it's worth, it sounds like the runner-up candidate agrees:
> Lasconi condemned the court's ruling as "illegal" and "immoral", saying "today is the moment when the Romanian state has trampled on democracy".
>No, I'm taking a step back and saying that if the law provides for nullifying the election, it's a bad law. It's an even worse law if no due process is involved (i.e. "nothing has been proven against this candidate in court as of yet, but we're going to go ahead and nullify the election because he benefited from foreign interference, as far as we can tell based on what our intelligence services are telling us").
Sorry, this is the constitution, it does not allow for years of appeals and dragging your feat. Are you really believing that the guy used zero funds and you need a court and 3 appeals to prove to you that he used more then ZERO funds ?
>The US constitution does not just "allow" for years of appeals, it guarantees your right to defend yourself through that process.
Don't worry, the pro Ruzzian traitor will have his appeals and lawyers to defend him from fraud and the other accusations, the elections were cancelled and will be repeated so we do not let Ruzzia influence them.
What does the US constitution say if it is discovered that there is credible evidence for :
1 a foreign power was involved in election and it affected the results (illegal in Romania)
2 the candidate that commuted fraud by not declaring the money he used (this is illegal in Romania)
3 the guy was unknown for the media and public before election so nobody checked him, now that Tic Tok made him popular it was also discovered a lot of bullshit he done, one of them is glorifying Iron Guard a fascist party in Romania's past (it is illegal to do that here)
In USA you let Ruzzia to chose your president because you are only 99% sure?
Then won't the president pardon himself? Create some civil war?
As I said the constitutional Court decided to repeat the election, they did not decided to jail the guy, or execute him, or even block him to run in Ruzzia.
No, you prosecute and send for trial the people that committed the illegal acts. If that means deposing the acting president, the you do that - but you do it when you have the proof and a legitimate trial. Not the Constitutional Court inventing a power for itself that it doesn't have, based on vague wording in the Constitution (specifically, they based this decision on an article of the Romanian Constitution that says that "[the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed, and confirms the results of the vote", with no further stipulations - article 146, paragraph f).
> Not the Constitutional Court inventing a power for itself that it doesn't have, based on vague wording in the Constitution (specifically, they based this decision on an article of the Romanian Constitution that says that "[the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed, and confirms the results of the vote", with no further stipulations - article 146, paragraph f).
What powers do you believe this grants, that would make logical sense in a situation like this?
None essentially. It just enables other specific laws that organize the functioning of the court in this area, and perhaps it enables the court to settle questions on whether electoral processes have been followed.
For example, there is a specific law that specifies how the CCR can verify the results of the election (that certain institutions send the vote counts to it, in some specific format, within X days etc). The same law also specified what happens if the CCR finds that the vote counts are suspect - who can raise such concerns, within what dates, and most importantly, what happens next, when the elections are re-done and by whose decisions. This is how the court is supposed to function.
In contrast, the court has trampled on its own jurisprudence, where it only yesterday night (local time) declared that it can't hear any new claims about the elections until the end of the next round.
> None essentially. It just enables other specific laws that organize the functioning of the court in this area
> [the Constitutional Court] ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed
I have no context on this beyond what you're writing, so I'm taking everything you're saying at face value. But even when I do that... don't you feel "the legislature shall have the power to organize the functioning of the court regarding elections" is a manifestly different sentence from "the court ensures that the procedures for the election of the Romanian President are followed, and confirms the results of the vote"?
Our constitution [0] uses this verbiage a lot. For example, here is what it says about the President:
> (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.
The official English wording of the role of the court is:
> f) to guard the observance of the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and to confirm the ballot returns;
Note the similarity of the verbiage. I don't think the first one can be read to mean that the president can interfere with any authority they think might not properly be respecting the Constitution. I don't believe this is the intended reading, and definitely no one recognizes such a power for the President of Romania. So, I don't think the equivalent verbiage in the article on the power of the CCR should be read to give them the power to decide anything they want on the electoral process.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, just a citizen of this country. But to me it doesn't seem proper that a Court can devise procedures that are not specified in any law.
My belief is that no one has the right, or the legal and constitutional power, to annul the elections based on campaign influence. The law only specifies a right to annul one election (a specific day, not the whole process as was done here), and then only if the voting process itself is corrupted (miscounting votes, stopping people from voting, physically coercing people to vote, etc).
The regular court system can pursue individuals who conspired with Russia (including, likely, Călin Georgescu himself!), prosecute and try them for treason.
Intelligence services and electoral authorities have the power to stop the interference while it is in progress, by forcing people and sites to take it down, banning entire domains if they don't comply, arresting people who are coordinating with foreign nationals, etc.
The election will be done again, and people can vote their favorite person again, this time with the full knowledge of who is behind them.
It sucks that authorities did nothing before the elections, but I suspect that disqualifying the fascist guy because of fraud and interference would have produced the exact same complains from his fans and the Ruzzian trolls.
Right? You would claim that he should be allowed to continue until the courts will decide it was fraud, and until the appeals are done and until the complains to the EU court are also complete.
Is there a law that calls for election annulment if a candidate does illegal stuff? I doubt. In fact, usually there are specifically no such laws to avoid initiatives for political prosecution.
Over in Japan, the newly re-elected Hyogo Prefecture Governor is being sued for violating electoral laws concerning his use of social media, with the penalties including voiding of the election and the stripping of his electoral rights.
Incidentally, the Governor was re-elected in an upset victory after being ousted by the Hyogo Prefecture Legislature over alleged power harrassment scandals. Yes, the Japanese establishment hates him and are doing anything possible to get rid of him.
> and are doing anything possible to get rid of him.
As long as it's legal, there is nothing very wrong with it. If he committed crimes that influenced the election, then the election is void and he should be banned from politics.
I have long since come to the conclusion that democracy as a power system is merely an excuse for the Powers That Be to obtain and maintain power, it just has better plausible deniability than other means like monarchies, dictatorships, etc. at the cost of not having fine-grained control.
Occasionally there are aberrations like Trump, which subsequently lead to the Powers That Be doing everything they can to make sure the vote is made "right".
They're all just different heads of the same hydra. "Uniparty" might be a term you're familiar with. All the political catfighting is just kabuki theatre to give the notion power is changing hands.
I'm pretty sure that the Powers That Be didn't want the Fair Labor Act, or the Clean Air Act, or the Pure Food and Drug Act, or a number of other things. They may not care who is president, but on issues that they do care about, they still take some losses.
Large companies always fight against laws regulating them that didn't exist before; but once they exist they always fight for extending them so that new competitors can't arise.
"Democracy doesn't effect much" is not the same as "it does nothing at all".
