The National Election Committee (NVB) has approved Budapest mayoral candidate Dávid Vitézy’s request to have a recount of the invalidated ballots in the Budapest mayoral race. The election was won by an extremely thin margin by incumbent Gergely Karácsony. Only 324 votes, 0.04 percentage points, separated the two highest-finishing candidates when the final count came in for the night.
In Hungary, unlike in the United States, very thin margins do not trigger automatic recounts. Vitézy had to appeal to some form of irregularity or possible wrongdoing in order to request a second tabulation of the ballots. He argued that in this year’s election, the number of invalidated ballots was unusually high. 24,592 votes out of the 806,142 total were tossed out, which amounts to 3.05 per cent—76 times more than Karácsony’s margin of victory. It was also 78 per cent higher than in the election for party lists for city council, as Vitézy pointed out at a press conference, an election held on the same day under the same rules.
Vitézy went on to argue that the
members of the ballot counting committees were notified quite late into the process
about the fact that votes cast for both a running candidate and Szentkirályi, who withdrew in the last minute and thus her name was simply crossed out on the ballots, were valid.
As a result, polling places made inconsistent decisions on the issue.
In addition, at certain polling stations Szentkirályi’s name was not crossed out perfectly visibly, which could have led to a confused voter casting their vote for a withdrawn candidate.
According to the Budapest Election Office’s guidebook, ballots where both a withdrawn candidate and a candidate in the running are selected should count as a valid vote for the candidate still in the running.
The local election office of Budapest did finalize the results, which Vitézy appealed to the National Election Committee. Now, as his appeal has been upheld,
the recount can start, and Budapest residents will have to wait a little longer to find out who their Mayor is going to be for the next five years.
The National Election Office’s official website now marks the Budapest mayoral election’s status as ‘under legal review’.
It should be noted, however, that this is only a recount of the invalidated ballots. Therefore, the procedure does not allow for the possibility to detect ballots that were counted as valid, but perhaps should have been invalidated according to the rules. This helps Vitézy’s chances, since most likely a large part of the tossed out ballots were the product of the confusion over Szentkirályi’s withdrawal, and her subsequent endorsement of Vitézy.
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