Steven N.
With a new legal amendment permitting the practice of so-called “voting tourism,” Fidesz has legalized a form of electoral fraud that has hitherto been a crime, claims the Hungarian Socialist Party’s Bertalan Tóth (pictured).
“The MSZP’s Parliamentary caucus has launched a request for members of the Democratic Electoral Alliance in Parliament to appeal to the Constitutional Court to review the law legalizing the establishment of fictitious residences,” the party’s co-chair said on Wednesday.
According to Bertalan Tóth, the Fidesz-sponsored amendment changes the concept of residence, as a person who establishes residency in a location will not have to actually live at the given address.
This legal possibility opens the floodgates to election fraud, even on a massive scale, in that someone can claim a fictitious address without actually living there just to influence the outcome of an election in a given constituency. Such abuses until now have been condemned by the courts, as evidenced by several convictions handed down in connection with voting tourism coming over from Ukraine, he explained.
“With this newly-adopted law, the Fidesz-KDNP allows things that until now have been considered a crime. MSZP believes that this weakens legal security in Hungary, endangers the purity of elections and permits other serious abuses. It therefore considers it necessary for the MPs of the Democratic Electoral Alliance to initiate an annulment of the disputed provisions by way of the Constitutional Court,” said the Socialist politician.
[Népszava]
