It could be said that the hour does not change anything here and there and in the end all the good that ended well. Unfortunately, this slight delay cannot be said to be the only stain on the impeccable white suit of the Central Election Commission (CEC). If this delay was really just dust, then handing out unstamped ballot envelopes to voters in two polling stations is already a big spot in the most visible place. 419 unstamped envelopes were found in the Pushkin Lyceum, but there were 208 such envelopes in the Riga Classical Gymnasium. According to the law, these unstamped ballot envelopes and the ballot papers in them were declared invalid.
Against the general background, these unaccounted votes did not seem to do any great trouble. They had little effect on the overall election results (theoretically it is possible to redistribute one seat in favor of “Unity” if 320 people voted for “Unity” as a result of re-elections in these polling stations, but no one would vote for “Harmony”), but in any case shadow over the whole electoral process.
Two things need to be pointed out here.
First of all, any voter who has voted in these polls feels quite silly – he cannot really know whether his vote has been counted or not.
Although in general it does not seem to matter, for each person individually it is a spit in the face. People want to realize that their voice means something, it’s important, and they decide. If the vote you cast (as in these two polling stations) is actually thrown in the trash instead of the ballot box, then such cases undermine people’s faith in democratic ideals and undermine the belief that your vote matters.
The second point is hypothetical. This time the elections were not only without big surprises, but also without a real fight. The winners of the previous election – “Harmony” – conducted a completely apathetic pre-election campaign. Almost to say, it was ignored. It was quite clear that the party had come to terms with the loss and was ready to hand over power to the former opposition. As the status of a member of the Riga City Council in itself gives very little (the salary is relatively small, the impact is almost none and the prestige is not too great), being in the opposition is by no means the most coveted job worth fighting for blood. In this situation, the failed elections in two of the 138 polling stations did not cause too much stress throughout the political arena, from the parties themselves, their supporters to the Central Election Commission. On the other hand, it was this mess that was probably the main reason for the long non-publication of election results.
However, we remember the previous RD elections in 2017, when the exit-poll showed victory for the opposition and it was only by summarizing the results from the last polls that it became clear that Ushakov & Co had managed to maintain a majority. They do not even want to think about the confusion that would arise if the elections in those two polls were declared non-existent. Trials and trials, general challenge to the legitimacy of elections and legal casualty, mutual insults and the search for guilt. If something like this had happened, then the resignation of Arnis Cimdars, the long-term head of CVK at that time, would have to be completely justified.
However, although nothing like that happened, after the 2018 Saeima elections without any justification (except that he has been in office for too long), Cimdars was suspended and Kristīne Bērziņa was appointed to head the CEC. This case could also be dispensed with if it did not reveal a very characteristic feature of the ‘new policy’. People are being replaced, the system is broken even if everything is working well, as was the case with Cimdara. You just need to free up space for your people and remove the “old” shots from your eyes. In this way, the transit industry has been destroyed, and Latvia has suffered the most from an economic point of view, despite the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic was the most medically successful among the Baltic States. The fact that Latvia has the largest decline in GDP among the Baltic States in the first half of this year is a direct consequence of this “let’s tear down everything” policy.
In the RD elections, this replacement of CVK’s “old staff” cost deceived voters in two polling stations, but the behavior of the “elephant dish shop” in the Latvian economic administration already has much more serious consequences – broken lives of people who have lost their jobs.
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