Nine Polish election officials charged over vote count error

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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.

Nine election officials have been charged over the misattribution of votes at one polling station during the final round of Poland’s recent presidential election. If found guilty, they could face up to three years in prison.

They mistakenly declared that conservative, opposition-aligned candidate Karol Nawrocki – the eventual winner of the election – had received the most votes, 466, with his more liberal, government-backed rival, Rafał Trzaskowski, getting only 331. In actual fact, those numbers were the other way round.

After the election, some supporters of Trzaskowski, including politicians from the ruling coalition, suggested that Nawrocki’s victory was questionable given irregularities in vote-counting at some polling stations. However, the number of identified miscounted votes is well below Nawrocki’s winning margin.

On Wednesday, prosecutors announced that they had charged nine members of district electoral commission number four in the village of Wieniec in central Poland – including its chair and deputy chair – with failing to fulfil their duties to the detriment of the public interest.

A spokesman for the district prosecutor’s office in the nearby city of Włocławek said that the erroneous vote count stemmed from various procedural failures, including not preparing a handwritten draft voting protocol, not properly reading data from the IT system, and not verifying figures against the handwritten version.

Five of the accused have admitted to the offence, three have denied it, while prosecutors say that one of the accused has not yet claimed guilt or innocence, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

After the National Electoral Commission (PKW) declared Nawrocki the winner of the 1 June presidential run-off vote, Trzaskowski’s campaign encouraged people to report examples of vote-counting irregularities to a specially created website.

The Supreme Court authorised a recount of votes at 13 polling stations, while the then justice minister, Adam Bodnar, requested recounts at 1,500 more.

However, following an investigation, prosecutors announced in late July that the scale of irregularities in vote-counting was nowhere near enough to overturn Nawrocki’s almost 370,000-vote winning margin. Nawrocki was sworn in as president on 6 August.

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: Wladyslaw Czulak/Agencja Wyborcza

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.