If you pay money to run electoral ads, for someone's campaign, this money has to be declared, and the ads should be marked as such.

In this case, neither has happened.

TikTok also did not ban these bot networks as they should have according to the electoral laws, so there will be a separate investigation that I think the EU commission has started to find out why they are not complying with electoral laws in the countries they operate in.

If i pay some money to google to run some ads for the 2 main parties, and don't report it, do they also get disqualified?

Europe is like the U.S. We don’t have Political Action Committees here, or anything similar. Political campaigns, particularly in the lead up to an election, are tightly controlled and limited to ensure candidates have to compete on an even playing field. They can’t just try and outspend their competitors.

Heck in the UK, it’s illegal for political campaigning to occur outside the few weeks before an election. Obviously politicians will do everything they can to demonstrate their value to the people all the time. But they can’t engage in explicit campaigning, with calls to actions about how to vote, outside of the time limited campaign period. It’s all done to keep as much money as possible out of our political system, and prevent our politics becoming ruled entirely by money, like we see in the U.S. Hell there recently been huge controversy in the UK because out PM accepted some clothes (literally a few suits) from a party donor, and that was considered as being potentially illegal campaign support.

Campaign spending in the U.S. is literally two orders of magnitude greater, the fact that someone wins while only spending $2billion rather than $3billion really doesn’t say that much. Musks contributions to Trump alone are an order of magnitude greater than the total spend allowed for an entire party in the UK.

An analogy would be buying github stars or reddit upvotes for an adversary to get them banned.

Explains the money trail, and there's even a nice picture with one of the sovereign candidates and the Tracia Unita group who paid for the campaign.

They even threw in a tirade about Trump to top it off.

But yeah, let's throw away an entire country's election because of the ramblings of Victor Ilie.

Thank God he put it all together and saved Romania. No investigation needed, he figured it out.

If you pay a small amount of money for some political ads, nobody is going to care, because it obviously didn't affect the results substantially. If the amount is large enough, the situation may be different. And then both you and Google may face consequences for illegal election interference.

No, the whole electoral process will be restarted, as if it had never happened, starting from potential candidates gathering signatures to validate their registration. Anyone who wishes to run has to start anew.

And it's almost impossible to believe that the candidate whose campaign was found to be so illegally run that the entire process has been corrupted and has to be restarted could be allowed to run again. This would be pantomime of the highest level. And I'm saying this as someone who thinks this decision was a soft coup.

It should be noted that Romanian Constitutional Court has a long tradition for yielding to political influence. Read and weep [0]

[0] page 93 onwards Corruption https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1317...

1. Buy ads for opposition.

2. Opposition reports invalid figures not accounting for russian ads

3. People accuse opposition of being helped by russia and misreporting funds.

4. Opposition wins, recount stays the same, courts annul it because russia.

Am I missing something here?

First, the elections will be rerun. If people think the annulment was unfair, the opposition candidate may get even more votes due to organic publicity.

Second, you can't just buy ads. You must also find someone with wide enough circulation willing to show the ads. And that someone may be liable for the consequences.

First, yes they will be re-ran, and it's doubtful the winning candidate will even get to run. Also, where does it end, do we keep re-running it until we get the right candidate? What if it was the candidate you voted for, how would you feel?

Second, yes apparently you can, it happened. If the whole country was able to be swayed by TikTok ads but apparently no politicians noticed then they aren't very good at politicking or governing. If they noticed an issue they should have dealt with TikTok earlier.

So far TikTok hasn't been held liable, only the voters who choose to vote for this candidate.

The voters were apparently too stupid and got tricked by scary russian ads, so we must re-do the elections until they come to their senses and pick the correct candidate.

It's TikTok's fault for letting Russian ads in, so we'll take some of their money and we'll also stay in power. Win-win for the establishment.

It couldn't possibly be that the voters knew exactly what they were voting for... They're too gullible, that's it.

Whatever your opinion on the candidates is, it's a fact that many people didn't consider the election results legitimate. In a situation like that, it's impossible to make them legitimate by any administrative action. Courts can make the results legal, but legitimacy is something people decide on their own. If legitimacy is considered important, the only way to regain it is to run new elections. It may take a long time and many attempts, and it may not work at all. But you can't have legitimate elections if the losers don't accept that the elections were fair and they lost.

it's a fact that more people considered it legitimate, otherwise the candidate in question wouldn't have won the election.

let me ask you this about your "fact" how "many people" didn't consider it legitimate? should be easy to answer since it's a fact.

> If the vast majority of them accept that the elections were legitimate, they were legitimate.

???

> determined by the people who don't like the results

So I guess I have to ask, which people and how are you determining majority legitimacy if not by vote?

If your candidate won, your opinion on the legitimacy doesn't matter much. If your candidate lost, your opinion matters more. If you think that the elections were legitimate, your opinion doesn't matter much. If you think they were not legitimate, your opinion matters more.

It doesn't really matter if the elections were fair. If the losers don't trust the system, the elections were not legitimate.

A society can handle a small number of people who question its legitimacy. Maybe 5%, maybe 10%, maybe even 20%, depending on the overall level of trust. If too many people don't trust the system, the society doesn't really work anymore. Laws, constitutions, and other institutions are only as strong as people's faith in them.

Many celebrities do the same as well via their social media presence.