Poland’s justice minister Adam Bodnar has filed a request to the Supreme Court to order an inspection of ballots in 1,472 polling districts across the country.
Bodnar’s move came after pressure from the Civic Coalition, the centre-left party led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Party chiefs have alleged irregularities with the counting of the votes in the presidential election second round on June 1.
That ballot saw the defeat of the government-favoured candidate Rafał Trzaskowski by the opposition Conservatives’ (PiS) candidate Karol Nawrocki by 370,000 votes (51 per cent to 49 per cent) with the voting taking place in almost 32,000 polling districts.
Bodnar took to Platform X on June 25 to announce his move: “I have submitted petitions to the Supreme Court requesting an inspection of ballots in 1,472 District Electoral Commissions,” he said. He justified his action after two protests based on what was claimed to be statistical evidence of abnormal increases in the vote for Nawrocki between the two rounds of the elections.
The Supreme Court’s disputed Supervisory Chamber was set to rule on the validity of the presidential election at an open hearing on July 1 . It was set to announce what decision it had taken after considering the almost 60,000 protests submitted.
Some 90 per cent of those were identical and based on a submission made by Tusk’s family attorney and party MP Roman Giertych alleging irregularities in the counting of the votes.
The Supervisory Chamber was disputed as it was appointed during the time of the last PiS government . That decision was questioned by European courts and then the Tusk government, which refused to recognise it as a valid court.
As a result of the controversy Bodnar has been demanding that the Supreme Court should delegate the decision on the validity of the election to judges appointed before PiS came into office.
His petition to examine the ballots cast in the 1,472 polling districts was based on an analysis produced by academic Dr Krzysztof Kontek. That suggested that in almost 1,500 districts, Nawrocki polled more than should have been statistically expected when compared with other districts, which generated between 300,000 and 500,000 extra votes for him.
That analysis has been challenged by other experts who argued it was selective and excluded any examination of districts in which Nawrocki managed to out-perform expectations, according to the same statistical model used.
Bodnar, though, considered the challenge made by Kontek to be “based on a scientifically verifiable method” and submitted a request to examine the votes cast in virtually all the districts cited by the researcher.
On June 21, Tusk expressed doubts about the election result and called for the recounting of votes.
On June 25, Giertych appeared on a commercial TV show alleging that electoral district committees, which are responsible for the counting of the votes, may have been infiltrated by right-wing extremists whom he suspected of “tampering” with the ballot papers.
The PiS, in turn, have accused the Tusk administration of attempting to tamper with the votes.
Party members pointed to the fact that the prosecution service had no legal basis for conducting any vote counts and, without such counts, the mere examination of ballot papers would be unlikely to produce any conclusive results and could lead to suspicion of post-election vote tampering.
