MADRID 29 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of the Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP) of Romania, Toni Grebla, has not ruled out that the first round of the presidential elections will have to be repeated and has given until this Sunday, December 1 at 10:00 p.m. (11:00 p.m. peninsular time in Spain) to finish the counting of the more than 9 million votes cast.
“I hope that most of the counties, especially the smaller ones, will be finished today and maybe tomorrow at noon we will have them all. In the large ones there are many ballots to count and the staff is relatively small,” Grebla explained this Friday in the Romanian state radio.
Grebla has advanced that if the Constitutional Court considers that there has been such a large fraud that it is necessary to repeat the first round, this could take place on December 15, while the second would be set for the 29th of the same month.
“If you determine that the fraud is so great that it causes a change in the order of political competitors, then you can invalidate them, but there must be clear evidence that the order was influenced by the way the vote was conducted or how it was the votes were counted,” he explained.
Grebla has stressed that the AEP is prepared to hold the elections as soon as the Constitutional Court makes a decision.
In that first round of the presidential elections, Calin Georgescu, an independent, nationalist and considered pro-Russian candidate, emerged victorious with 23 percent of the votes, to everyone’s surprise, amidst accusations of lack of transparency during his campaign and of having been favored by TikTok.
Her rival in the second round will be the conservative candidate Elena Lasoni, who narrowly defeated the Romanian Prime Minister, the social democrat Marcel Ciolacu, who has criticized the Constitutional Court’s order to recount the votes. “I don’t want second place! I’m not interested,” he said.
Meanwhile, Romanians have another appointment this Sunday with the polls, this time to choose the composition of Parliament. “I also urge all citizens of the country and those who live abroad to go and vote,” encouraged the president of the AEP.