Romanian court cancels presidential election amid TikTok Russian influence fears

https://www.politico.eu/article/romania-court-cancels-presidential-election-runoff-tiktok-russian-influence-calin-georgescu/

by abricq • 2 years ago

9 12 2 years ago

politico.eu

jfengel• 2 years ago

That is remarkable. I wish the article could be more detailed. I'd be fascinated to read more about their thinking. (They may well not have issued a more detailed document yet.)

I don't know anything about Romanian courts. I'm not even sure if the US Supreme Court would have that authority. Our Court basically has the authority that it takes and we let it take, since the Constitution is incredibly vague about what the court really does, but I can't imagine it canceling elections unless the vote-counting process itself became suspect.

In the US, a foreign disinformation campaign is just plain legal. We may not like it, but people will insist on their right to vote on whatever basis they want. About the only limit is that you can't literally buy votes, and even that isn't so sure any more.

riehwvfbk• 2 years ago

These techniques are tried out in the tiniest of the free world's puppet satellites first. Depending on how the populace reacts, canceled elections may soon be coming near you. If you look at the timeline of sanctions that got rolled out against Iran or Russia, it's always some sycophant state that "proposes" them and the Big Kanhuna follows up in a week.

maximinus_thrax3• 2 years ago

The law is pretty straight-forward in Romania about this and the court acted well within the law, which is pretty clear and not open to interpretation. The Romanian constitution grants this court the assignment to "ensure compliance with the procedure for the election of the President of Romania and confirms the voting results" https://www.constitutiaromaniei.ro/art-146-atributii/ section F). It is actually the only court able to do this. This court (https://www.ccr.ro/curtea-constitutionala-a-romaniei-unica-a...) is different than the Supreme Court (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Court_of_Cassation_and_Ju...).

Here is the court's decision https://www.ccr.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HCC-32-2024.pd..., you can use Google translate on it, look for section 14, where it specifies exactly what was violated. TLDR, one candidate had preferential treatment on social media platforms by violating this piece of legislation: https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/55481. Basically, all electoral ads or endorsements must be marked as such. People endorsing candidates on their own is one thing, but influencers were bought off with dark campaign money (the candidate declared a campaign budget of 0 RON - absolutely ludicrous) and alongside a huge bot farm on tiktok (confirmed by tiktok here https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-eu/continuing-to-protect-the-...) managed to give this candidate a very large lead in the race.

At this point in the race, there were 3 options, none of them comfortable:

- cancel the election and try again later (what actually happens). Meanwhile law enforcement started investigating the money trail and now they also found a bunch of instigators who were ready to start a 'protest' with guns (which are super illegal in Romania) and flashbangs

- allow the election to happen and open the country to the risk of other candidates attacking the result in court (because of the aforementioned laws) - longer headache

- allow the election to happen and pretend everything is fine (which happened in the US and the UK in 2016)

Don't listen to the noise on hackernews, aside from the extremists and the constant contrarians, this decision was fairly well received by the general population. Keep in mind that Romania is currently fighting a hybrid war with Russia and the propaganda attacks are everywhere on the internet. The court did the right thing, democracy didn't 'die' in Romania, this is actually the type of event when the 'checks and balances' within a state need to work and work they did.

This is an unprecedented decision, but unprecedented in the country's context is not such a big deal, as we're only in the 34th year of our current democratic stint, literally the 8th time in Romania's history when we get to vote in a presidential election (the first 'election' doesn't count as it was provisional right when Ceausescu fell). So it's unprecedented but it's not based on some open interpretation of the law, it's pretty straightforward.

ISW also has something about what happened during these elections: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/likely-kremlin-bac....

NVHacker4• 2 years ago

You do realize that the "someone broke the rules" reason, unless supported by clear evidence of actual voting fraud is a very lose reason for canceling a democratic vote and really sticks ? This sets a very dangerous precedent and an unrealistic bar for all future elections. Note that no evidence was presented to show that any of the candidates broke the rules, just that they might have benefited from third parties breaking the rules.

ImJamal• 2 years ago

Am I missing something? It sounds like Russia made some posts on TikTok but then they say Russia took "aggressive hybrid action" without explaining it. Is that just a scary way of saying tiktok posts? This article is so vauge about what Russia allegedly did that was "aggressive".

If a foreign government making posts on tiktok is enough to make an election illegitimate, then do they really think their previous election was legitimate? Surely there was some bad actor doing the same thing in previous elections?

NVHacker4• 2 years ago

The difference is who won. We cannot have interference and the wrong candidate winning, can we ? Also, in this case the spotlight is on one candidate only. There were two condidates that had much more spending on TikTok but nobody is looking at the source of those funds.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42339819

canadiantim• 2 years ago

Sounds like judicial meddling is the bigger danger in Romania

NVHacker4• 2 years ago

This is the reason given by the court. Used google translate on paragraph 14 (on page 3) from this document: https://www.ccr.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Hotarare_32_20... Who's not smelling a rat ?

"In the present case, the freely expressed nature of the vote was violated by the fact that voters were misinformed through an electoral campaign in which one of the The candidates benefited from an aggressive promotion, carried out in circumvention of the national legislation in the field of electoral and by abusive exploitation of the algorithms of social media platforms. Vote manipulation was all the more obvious as the electoral materials promoting a candidate did not carry the signs specific to electoral advertising according to Law no. 370/2004. In addition, the candidate also benefited preferential treatment on social media platforms, which had the effect of distorting the manifestation of the will of the voters."

Romanian court cancels presidential election amid TikTok Russian influence fears

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