Steven N.
The Election Office has acknowledged that there may be more than 15,000 on the cross-border voter list who are dead but unfortunately can still have their votes mailed in by zealous Fidesz activists without a problem.
-posted independent MP Ákos Hadházy on Facebook in regards to official information he had received from the agency.
Hadházy was informed that between 2018-2021, a total of 3,085 of “our deceased cross-border compatriots were removed from the voter rolls.”
Ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries who have been granted citizenship have the right to vote for party lists but not for individual candidates, or at least not in a legal manner.
Hadházy, however, believes that the number supplied by the government body about deceased cross-border voters is suspiciously low. As he reasons:
If we know that there are 13-15 deaths out of every 1,000 people in Hungary every year, it is easy to calculate that the number of deceased cross-border voters removed from the voter rolls over four years is at least 20,000. By comparison, only 3,000 of our compatriots were removed from the voter rolls.
And yet, “letters are sent to the addresses of these others as if they were alive, and their relatives can vote in place of them without a problem,” Hadházy writes.
The independent opposition MP asked the Election Office what it was doing about the matter, but “the answer was not reassuring at all,” he felt, noting that, “a law was passed that would remove those who were inactive over several election cycles from the system.”
However, he noted that “a statement was allegedly once released saying that it would be a good idea to report those who had died.”
Hadházy stated that “in a close race, a few thousand votes can determine the fate of a single mandate, and thus the entire election.”
As he added:
Even if a single envelope from a dead person is not returned, the phenomenon could still affect the outcome, in that we wouldn’t know exactly how many of the total votes are from citizens who are eligible to vote.
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