Poland’s election results challenged
WARSAW — Supporters of the mayor of Warsaw, joined by scores of Polish voters and rights groups, raced Thursday to file legal challenges to the validity of Sunday’s presidential election, which he narrowly lost to the incumbent, President Andrzej Duda.
The rush to file the complaints was the result of a new electoral code passed by the government in May, cutting the time to file such challenges from 14 days to three.
In lodging the official protests with the nation’s Supreme Court, supporters of the mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, were not expecting to overturn the result of the election, given the margin of defeat of nearly half a million votes.
Their object was more to expose what they said was a pattern of political interference that marred the country’s closest election since the end of communist rule in 1989 and to delay the certification of the vote long enough for it to be declared invalid.
If nothing else, the challenges will pose a test for a court system that has undergone sweeping changes since the governing Law and Justice party came to power five years ago. The government has been accused of undermining judicial independence and theoretically faces the prospect of becoming the first nation in the European Union to lose its voting rights.
Joanna Lemanska, the head of the Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs Chamber of the Supreme Court, which will rule on the validity of the election, was appointed by Duda. She suggested that she would step aside but has yet to do so.
Even if she does recuse herself, critics believe the special chamber is no longer an impartial arbiter of the law. But by overwhelming the judges with complaints, they hope to make it impossible for the judges to certify the results within the required 21 days.
Trzaskowski, who has not commented on the legal challenges, is scheduled to give a speech in the northern port city of Gdynia on Friday, where he will try to rally supporters against the government.
The most widespread irregularities were reported by the Polish diaspora, with tens of thousands of votes from abroad potentially left uncounted. But there were also reports of strange results in a number of nursing homes, which reported Duda winning 100 percent of the vote, and concerns about extra ballots sent to polling stations without proper documentation.