The Hungarian electoral system is not only biased but also creates loopholes for fraud

The Hungarian electoral system is not only biased, but it also leaves loopholes open to fraud and abuse. Before the election, authorites have accepted signatures endorsing candidates despite people reporting that their signatures were forged, while election day rules effectively allow ballot stuffing, forged ballots, and vote buying. With the help of experts, we have identified numerous other features that could manipulate the results in Fidesz’s favor.

On April 12 ten thousand polling stations will open all over Hungary. Until then, the news cycle is full of almost daily scandals, while the streets are plastered with election posters and propaganda materials put up by oligarchs close to the ruling party. Amid all this campaign noise, few people are looking into what loopholes are hidden in the election law – loopholes that could ultimately affect the integrity of the vote. With the help of legal experts, we examined the extent to which the laws guarantee that voters’ true will is reflected in the voting booths.

István Kincses, an attorney, has been practicing law for more than thirty years and regularly analyzes constitutional and electoral issues. In his view, the Hungarian electoral system is inherently biased, but the laws shaped to suit the ruling party over the past sixteen years leave even more room for manipulating the results.

“Election fraud, as I define it, is any technique or procedure that hinders or distorts the expression of voters’ actual will,” he states.

According to Kincses, the problem is not only evident in “classic” forms of fraud, such as fake nomination forms, vote-buying, or chain voting, but also in the law itself: the will of the voters is only truly reflected in the national party-list vote, where every vote is equal and the ninety-three seats are, in theory, distributed proportionally.

The remaining 106 seats, however, are allocated through single-member districts, where the winner takes all – even if they beat the runner-up by just a single vote.

This so-called mixed system has been the subject of criticism for decades: according to the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, the legislative amendments introduced in 2010 turned the electoral system into a “distorting mechanism” – this made it possible for Fidesz to secure a two-thirds majority in parliament even with as little as 30 percent of the vote. But according to the lawyer, the constant, arbitrary redrawing of electoral districts is just as problematic.

Unchecked powers of election officials

Voting is overseen by local election committees, who tally the results, and adjudicate suspicious cases. Almost everything is decided locally here: the head of the local election office is the municipality’s current clerk (jegyző), who is elected by the town (city, village etc.) council. The clerk appoints the election committee members (at least three people) from among his own staff. This means that the local council effectively elects the election committee years in advance.

According to the lawyer, political influence can manifest itself at this level in the form of financial incentives or personal relationships – especially where local authority, the employer, and political influence coincide. The clerk determines the number of polling stations and also decides which committee member is assigned to which polling station.

Mobile ballot box voting is a particularly sensitive issue: the vote-counting committees typically consist of at least three members, but in the case of mobile ballot box voting, two people take the ballot box to the voter’s home, leaving only one committee member in the polling station with the recording clerk. Institutional oversight is virtually nonexistent here, while the ballots are removed from the committee’s supervision.

“It doesn’t take a genius to see that in mobile ballot voting, only one member of the ballot-counting committee remains (plus the minute-taker), who, of course, was assigned there by the clerk. Thus, not only are the organizational conditions in place, but the circumstances also lend themselves to intentional abuse,” explains Kincses.

The second pillar of a potential case of election fraud is the external assistant. The election law allows voters who cannot read or are otherwise impaired to vote with another person assisting them. In such cases, the rules allow the assistant to go in an out of the polling station and accompany more than one voter. This practice is where voter intimidation and vote buying takes place, however, the election committee has no means to verify this as they cannot monitor interactions between assistants (in reality, political operatives pressuring voters to pick their candidates) and voters outside the polling station.

Disappearing votes

Another problem is gaps in documentation. According to the lawyer, the greatest threat to the integrity of the elections at present is that the initial number of printed ballots is not made public. The election law only stipulates that unused ballots must be counted at the start of the vote count; however, the initial quantity does not need to be recorded.

In 2022, Kincses examined dozens of election protocols, including Protocol No. 13 from Mátészalka: in this one, not even the number of blank ballots was listed. Thus, in theory, an extra ballot could turn up at any time, and some could disappear – according to the lawyer, the rapid disposal (ballots must be destroyed within ninety days) makes subsequent verification impossible. Especially if the protocols are incomplete to begin with.

There are two details that raise even more serious questions – and about which the majority of voters know nothing. One is the issue of the security mark on the ballots. By law, every ballot must bear a mark that allows voters to verify whether they have received a genuine ballot. However, in recent elections, this mark has remained virtually invisible to voters: in neither 2018 nor 2022 was it clear what exactly voters were supposed to look for on the ballot.

The National Election Commission previously stated that they use printing techniques that make the security mark visible only under specific lighting conditions – meaning it may not be visible inside the voting booth. This means that

the majority of voters cannot verify whether they have received a genuine ballot.

This is problematic because the law does not list the absence of a security mark as a ground for invalidity – meaning that, in theory, a ballot without such a mark, even one made at home, could count as a legal vote.

This leads to another, even bigger problem: the issue of excess ballots.

“According to election rules, if more votes are cast in a polling station than the number of voters listed in the voter registry, the difference must be proportionally deducted from the votes of all candidates. At first glance, this may seem like a technical correction, but in reality, it hides a serious potential for abuse”

With a sufficient number of extra ballots, it is even possible to deliberately undermine a particular candidate’s results.

Legal ballot stuffing

For now, we can only offer preliminary estimates and speculations about voter fraud election day. However, it is already clear how the picture is taking shape during the candidate nomination phase: through the industrial-scale forgery of fake nomination forms.

Based on reports from Átlátszó readers, by mid-March hundreds of people had discovered that their signatures appeared on the nomination forms of candidates they had never even heard of before. In our articles so far,

we have identified twenty-one candidates who received forged endorsements, including candidates from Fidesz and other parties currently in Parliament.

Several of our readers found themselves listed alongside three to five different candidates at once. In some cases, signatures of dead family members were forged to support candidates. The electoral committees however, dismissed most of these complaints.

According to the National Police Headquarters, eighty criminal proceedings had already been initiated for the use of forged private documents, misuse of personal data, and violations of election regulations.

Already during the 2022 elections, Átlátszó documented many cases of “classic” electoral fraud across the country – we filmed a chain voting scheme in a Putnok parking lot, we caught wind of votes getting bought with five kilograms of meat in Makó, and documented organized bussing of voters in Karcag.

International observers saw similar things: the EU body responsible for human rights and democratic institutions, the OSCE, and the European Network of Election Observation Organizations – also an EU body – uncovered serious security gaps in the mail-in voting process from abroad. In Romania and Serbia, there were instances in several polling stations where a single person cast multiple votes, envelopes were burned, security cameras were covered, or ballot boxes were left unattended.

In one constituency, according to Danish observers, the number of ballots counted on election was nearly double the number of registered voters.

According to Kincses, there is a solution: if more independent delegates were present on the committees, if mobile ballot box voting were recorded, and if the minutes were digitized and stored for a longer period of time. But most importantly, they would make public the number of ballots issued and the security features, which voters can use to verify that they received a genuine ballot.

In the 2022 “20,000 for Clean Elections” campaign, the presence of opposition delegates reduced gross abuses – but did not eliminate system errors. “That is why they say it is not about who you vote for, but who counts the votes and according to what rules,” Kincses concludes.