Steven N.
In mid-November, Parliament approved a legal amendment that critics charged could open the doors to greater levels of “voting tourism” in Hungary, according to the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ) and Political Capital.
Now, Hungary’s opposition parties have announced in a joint statement that they are planning to challenge the law at the Constitutional Court. They claim that the “voting tourism” law allows for someone to establish a fictitious residence in a place where they do not actually live for the sole purpose of voting in that district.
But Gergely Gulyás, Minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Office, claims the law was only intended to help at least 600,000 people who do not currently live at their official address.
In a press statement issued by Hungary’s opposition parties on December 30, they stated that:
In the 2018 and 2019 elections, it was witnessed on a massive scale that Hungarian citizens who don’t actually live in Hungary were registered as residing in dilapidated properties in order to take part in the elections. Through efforts by the opposition, both the Curia High Court and the police have established that such fraud did in fact take place, and that those involved were breaking the law.
Because of this, the statement reads, “opposition parties uniting on a common list, as promised, have today lodged a challenge with the Constitutional Court over the law that legalizes electoral fraud.”
[Telex]
