Losing Polish presidential candidate’s campaign encourages reporting of voting irregularities

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

The campaign chief of Poland’s losing presidential candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski, has pointed to reports of irregularities at some polling stations and has encouraged people to submit such incidents to a specially created website.

However, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has sought to calm concerns, writing on social media that, while “every reported case of irregularities in vote counting is being checked and analysed…assuming in advance that the elections were rigged does not serve the Polish state”.

Sunday’s run-off vote was the closest in the history of Polish presidential elections, with Trzaskowski, the deputy leader of Tusk’s centrist Civic Platform (PO) party, losing to Karol Nawrocki, the candidate supported by the national-conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS), by 50.9% to 49.1%.

In terms of the number of votes, Nawrocki received 369,591 more than Trzaskowski among the 20,844,163 ballots legally cast. Turnout, at 71.6%, was a record high for a presidential election in Poland.

On Monday, after official results had been announced by the National Electoral Commission (PKW), Trzaskowski conceded defeat and congratulated Nawrocki on his victory.

However, on Thursday, his campaign chief, Wioletta Paprocka, published a statement on social media saying that, if anyone has seen irregularities in the electoral process, they should report them to a website created by the campaign (which was first advertised just before the election run-off).

“We will contact the PKW to clarify each of these cases,” wrote Paprocka, whose message also mentioned four specific polling stations at which reports of irregularities have emerged.

At all four, Trzaskowski received far more votes than Nawrocki in the first round of the election, on 18 May, but got far fewer in the run-off vote on 1 June, notes news website Interia.

For example, at one of the stations, in Kraków, in the first round Trzaskowski won the most votes, 550, while Nawrocki only managed to come third, with 218. But in the run-off, Nawrocki received the most votes, 1,132, ahead of Trzaskowski on 540, according to the official count.

On Friday, the electoral commissioner for Kraków, Rafał Sobczuk, confirmed to the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that staff at the polling station in question had now admitted that they mixed up the votes and attributed Trzaskowski’s result to Nawrocki in the second round.

Speaking to PAP, the head of the National Electoral Office (KBW), which provides services to the PKW, confirmed that there is no legal possibility for them to order a recount. The only way that can happen is if a complaint is filed to the Supreme Court and it orders a recount.

The chairman of Kraków’s city council, Jakub Kosek, who is from Trzaskowski’s PO party, has announced that he plans to file such a complaint to the Supreme Court.

However, that situation is complicated by the fact that the chamber of the Supreme Court tasked with overseeing electoral complaints (and with confirming election results) is regarded as illegitimate by the ruling coalition due to the judicial reforms implemented by PiS when it was in power.

Róża Rzeplińska from Mam Prawo Wiedzieć, an NGO that monitors politicians’ activity, told broadcaster Radio Kraków that, with around half a million people involved in running elections, it is inevitable that some mistakes happen.

“If, from these individual cases, we start to create the feeling that elections in Poland are unfair, it is simply harmful for us,” she warned.

Nevertheless, some figures from the ruling coalition have claimed that there are now widespread reports of problems with Sunday’s vote. “Information about irregularities in the reports of electoral commissions is coming from all over the country,” claimed one MP, Roman Giertych.

Both Giertych and deputy interior minister Czesław Mroczek, in an interview with Polskie Radio, raised concern about the alleged use at polling stations of an unauthorised app intended to check whether someone had the right to vote.

“This matter must be clarified, because it is an extremely serious topic that could have affected the election process itself and the election results,” said Mroczek, who revealed that the police had intervened in some cases to prevent use of the app and that the issue had been reported to prosecutors.

However, a leading figure from PiS, Przemysław Czarnek, who was involved in Nawrocki’s campaign, declared that there were far more reported irregularities in favour of Trzaskowski. He said that thousands of them had been submitted to a special website launched by PiS ahead of the elections.

In a report on Sunday’s election run-off, international observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) found that the vote had been “competitive and well managed” and that “fundamental freedoms were respected”.

After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trzaskowski’s campaign also protested to the Supreme Court regarding the vote. However, its complaint was rejected.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Dawid Zuchowicz / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.