"In the present case, the freely expressed nature of the vote was violated by the fact that voters were misinformed through an electoral campaign in which one of the The candidates benefited from an aggressive promotion, carried out in circumvention of the national legislation in the field of electoral and by abusive exploitation of the algorithms of social media platforms. Vote manipulation was all the more obvious as the electoral materials promoting a candidate did not carry the signs specific to electoral advertising according to Law no. 370/2004. In addition, the candidate also benefited preferential treatment on social media platforms, which had the effect of distorting the manifestation of the will of the voters."
Am I missing something? It sounds like Russia made some posts on TikTok but then they say Russia took "aggressive hybrid action" without explaining it. Is that just a scary way of saying tiktok posts? This article is so vauge about what Russia allegedly did that was "aggressive".
If a foreign government making posts on tiktok is enough to make an election illegitimate, then do they really think their previous election was legitimate? Surely there was some bad actor doing the same thing in previous elections?
The difference is who won. We cannot have interference and the wrong candidate winning, can we ?
Also, in this case the spotlight is on one candidate only. There were two condidates that had much more spending on TikTok but nobody is looking at the source of those funds.
That is remarkable. I wish the article could be more detailed. I'd be fascinated to read more about their thinking. (They may well not have issued a more detailed document yet.)
I don't know anything about Romanian courts. I'm not even sure if the US Supreme Court would have that authority. Our Court basically has the authority that it takes and we let it take, since the Constitution is incredibly vague about what the court really does, but I can't imagine it canceling elections unless the vote-counting process itself became suspect.
In the US, a foreign disinformation campaign is just plain legal. We may not like it, but people will insist on their right to vote on whatever basis they want. About the only limit is that you can't literally buy votes, and even that isn't so sure any more.
Here is the court's decision https://www.ccr.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HCC-32-2024.pd..., you can use Google translate on it, look for section 14, where it specifies exactly what was violated. TLDR, one candidate had preferential treatment on social media platforms by violating this piece of legislation: https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/55481. Basically, all electoral ads or endorsements must be marked as such. People endorsing candidates on their own is one thing, but influencers were bought off with dark campaign money (the candidate declared a campaign budget of 0 RON - absolutely ludicrous) and alongside a huge bot farm on tiktok (confirmed by tiktok here https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-eu/continuing-to-protect-the-...) managed to give this candidate a very large lead in the race.
At this point in the race, there were 3 options, none of them comfortable:
- cancel the election and try again later (what actually happens). Meanwhile law enforcement started investigating the money trail and now they also found a bunch of instigators who were ready to start a 'protest' with guns (which are super illegal in Romania) and flashbangs
- allow the election to happen and open the country to the risk of other candidates attacking the result in court (because of the aforementioned laws) - longer headache
- allow the election to happen and pretend everything is fine (which happened in the US and the UK in 2016)
Don't listen to the noise on hackernews, aside from the extremists and the constant contrarians, this decision was fairly well received by the general population. Keep in mind that Romania is currently fighting a hybrid war with Russia and the propaganda attacks are everywhere on the internet. The court did the right thing, democracy didn't 'die' in Romania, this is actually the type of event when the 'checks and balances' within a state need to work and work they did.
This is an unprecedented decision, but unprecedented in the country's context is not such a big deal, as we're only in the 34th year of our current democratic stint, literally the 8th time in Romania's history when we get to vote in a presidential election (the first 'election' doesn't count as it was provisional right when Ceausescu fell). So it's unprecedented but it's not based on some open interpretation of the law, it's pretty straightforward.
You do realize that the "someone broke the rules" reason, unless supported by clear evidence of actual voting fraud is a very lose reason for canceling a democratic vote and really sticks ? This sets a very dangerous precedent and an unrealistic bar for all future elections.
Note that no evidence was presented to show that any of the candidates broke the rules, just that they might have benefited from third parties breaking the rules.
Not that is any of your business but I don't care about the candidate. I care about a corrupt system taking their abuse a step further, all in name of the democracy they are trampling on.
The precendent I was talking about is not legal. If they will be allowed to do this, then they will never be stopped.
How about Lasconi ? She would have won the presidency. Now, Ciolacu will.
> The precendent I was talking about is not legal. If they will be allowed to do this, then they will never be stopped.
They are allowed (by the constitution) to do this and they did do this. Your response is purely emotional and it will pass. I don't care about the candidate or about Lasconi, I personally would have had the same opinion about this decision if it was about any candidate.
These techniques are tried out in the tiniest of the free world's puppet satellites first. Depending on how the populace reacts, canceled elections may soon be coming near you. If you look at the timeline of sanctions that got rolled out against Iran or Russia, it's always some sycophant state that "proposes" them and the Big Kanhuna follows up in a week.
You're right, that is different. That is an American management firm hired by Yeltsin's daughter (also his campaign manager) to do polling and run focus groups. These activities are not illegal, violate no campaign finance laws in Russia, and are not paid for by US tax payers.
So why can't a candidate in a Romanian election hire TikTok to promote his candidacy? If "running focus groups" is legal, why is "showing people videos" illegal? TikTok just happens to work faster than old school influence methods, but that's technology.
If we agree that showing people videos online is legal, then the only problem would be if the candidate secretly used foreign (let's say, Russian) funds to finance his campaign. OK, so prove that in court. Isn't there such a thing as presumption of innocence?
Ah, too slow you say. The evil candidate will have taken over by then. OK, so require candidates to submit complete documentation of their campaign financing. Banks do KYC on their customers at scale and routinely ask for sources of funds. Why is it impossible to have the same standard for candidates?
P.S. In case you actually believe the "running focus groups" part: you should have seen what was on Russian TV in the 1990s. I assure you, this influence went way, way, way beyond focus groups. These "cute little mom and pop lobbyist shops" had complete control of all media. And they were famously bribing media executives with boxes full of cash that said "Xerox Copy Paper" on the outside. Yeah, totally different story.
> In case you actually believe the "running focus groups" part.... These "cute little mom and pop lobbyist shops" had complete control of all media.
You had something to say about that:
> OK, so prove that in court
Instead, you gave us an article about a firm providing polling and focus group services to a campaign for a fee and implied that it was the same thing that Russia does to Western governments.
Apologies for starting from far away. In my defense: when one's starting point is "your opponent thinks you are a paid troll", one has to tread lightly.
I was trying to provide context. You saw an article in Time Magazine. Try as you might, you can't just dismiss it as a work of a Russian troll. You have to actually read it, engage with it, and discuss the content instead of dismissing it out of hand and moving on. Notice that we are not debating whether US lobbying consultants were involved. We are discussing the magnitude of their involvement, and whether or not their participation was paid for appropriately. You have to agree that this is higher quality discussion.
OK, so we agreed that these firms were involved. How involved were they? I'll leave another link in this trail of breadcrumbs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_affair. Predicting your next rebuttal ("but there's no link to the US"): yeah, there's more.
In conclusion: it is absolutely true that other countries have done to Russia exactly what they are outraged about now. You can choose to be OK with that.
"In the present case, the freely expressed nature of the vote was violated by the fact that voters were misinformed through an electoral campaign in which one of the The candidates benefited from an aggressive promotion, carried out in circumvention of the national legislation in the field of electoral and by abusive exploitation of the algorithms of social media platforms. Vote manipulation was all the more obvious as the electoral materials promoting a candidate did not carry the signs specific to electoral advertising according to Law no. 370/2004. In addition, the candidate also benefited preferential treatment on social media platforms, which had the effect of distorting the manifestation of the will of the voters."