Steven N.
The National Election Commission (NVI) is only required to publish registry data after elections have been announced, but starting today, NVI will publish this information weekly, broken down by constituency and settlement type.
The news was announced a week ago after Bernadett Szél (pictured) and Szabolcs Szabó approached NVI regarding a new law affecting the practice of “voting tourism.” The pair requested that NVI publish registry data regularly, broken down by settlement type, until elections are held.
As previously reported, Parliament approved a new legal amendment in November that NGOs and opposition parties fear could open the floodgates to more widespread practice of a form of electoral fraud in Hungary called “voting tourism.”
Szél and Szabó requested a weekly breakdown so that they could track if the population of a settlement suddenly jumped, and so people who create fictitious addresses to influence the outcome of the election could be detected. They said that they had received a response from the President of NVI on Tuesday indicating that the commission would comply with their request.
The expanded data set is now accessible on the National Electoral Office’s website.
The current disclosure does not affect the obligation to provide information contained in the Electoral Procedure Act, but at the same time, as an additional service, it will facilitate the monitoring of changes in the number of voters.
-wrote NVI.
[Telex]
