After such a rough five years, the rigged election was just icing on the cake

In Diósdon, the will of the voters spectacularly swept away the old leadership, but that's not all: the mayor's election of the small town near Budapest was hacked in the first round by the local vote counting committee itself.

As we wrote last fall, the mayor of Diósd, who has been in power for 30 years - with the exception of one cycle - voted for the honorary citizen award with his own board. The self-reward broke the assurance of many, but this was only the tip of the iceberg in the last term of the now 77-year-old Géza Spéth.

Office coffin nails

Spéth won the 2019 election as an independent candidate with only 21 votes, and with his first decision, he already voted for the purchase of a new Suzuki Grand Vitara with the board. Not long after, however, Covid hit, the room for maneuver narrowed, and Diósd's already poor resources dwindled, so it was especially bad to buy a new car at the beginning of the cycle, when the old-new mayor didn't even cross a straw.

The next event upset the mood in early 2021, when they wanted to install a mobile concrete mixing plant in the industrial park in the heart of Diósd. The city, wedged between Budapest-Törökbálint-Érd, has no outside area, so there are companies in the industrial park whose operations do not disrupt the everyday life of the residents of the residential park built next to/around it, such as Phoenix Studio, which operates in the immediate vicinity of the planned concrete plant. The owner of the latter, Ibolya Tóth, a well-known music director, returned the Diósd Community Award he received in 2009 with an open letter addressed to Géza Spéth:

"I have received many professional awards over the years (Cannes Grand Prix, Ferenc Erkel Award, etc.), but this award was one of the dearest to me. I made this decision with a heavy heart, but there is nothing else I can do. This is how I want to protest that, apart from your many promises, you do not want to do anything against the start-up of the already built but unlicensed concrete plant. (…)

I know that you ran as an independent candidate and won the last election, BUT by now you have already separated yourself from the population, the Board of Representatives, and the protesters.

I wish my beloved Diósdom a more responsible leadership!"

Following the general indignation, a public petition was started, because the municipality's communication was not transparent, to say the least, and in the end the concrete plant backed down due to civil pressure, but despite Géza Spéth's efforts, she could not come out of the case as a winner.

Gábor Nagy on the scene

In 2019, the representative candidate ran on Spéth's team in electoral district 5, and although he suffered the biggest defeat, the mayor still honored him with a number of positions, ultimately going against the will of the voters:

Gábor Nagy became a member of the supervisory board and the financial committee of Városgazda Kft., and they created a new position for him, that of communications officer.

Nagy soon became the master of "life and death" in the small town, and his aggressiveness deservedly aroused the dislike of the residents. At the peak of his activity, having gained the mayor's trust, they blocked off an entire street with public flower boxes from passing traffic, which happened to be the one in which there was only one house: Gáboré Nagy.

The population was again outraged, another petition was started, the mayor backed down again, but the critical voices of the local groups were reported to Nagy Row for defamation. In the first round, the court ruled in favor of the six defendants in both the first and second instance, and Mr. Spéth's spokesperson was informed that he is a public figure and that his opinion is free. Last year, however, he reported another four people, for a similar reason;

this is how he wanted to keep the population in check and silence them - counterproductively and unsuccessfully.

This year, he was absent from the set trial days several times citing illness, and in mid-May he dared to the extent of notifying the court of his sudden illness only 20 minutes before the trial, robbing the time of six people in this way. Presumably, they did not want another lost lawsuit barely a month before the election.

The campaign

In Diósdon this year, three groupings made their mark, four to be precise; all in association colors.

• Pro Civitate represents right-wing, conservative values, led by András Dizzeri;
• the left-wing formation Élhtöbb Diósdért Egyesület, in 2019 many of them ran under the banner of the united opposition, including this year's mayoral candidate, Anna Makádi;
• the Diósdiak for the City (DAVE) teamed up with the Otthonunk Diósd (ODE) association, led by Géza Spéth.

The latter is also interesting because Géza Spéth built a real rainbow team by 2024, with an unprincipled alliance: among the representative candidates was Gábor Albitz, who ran against Spéth twice for the mayor's seat, what's more, Géza Spéth personally nominated Albizt in 2014 responsible for the fact that he was 7 votes behind the left-wing László Bogó, so he had to be without the status for five years, which he has regarded as a commission of faith since his first term.

Ferenc Czimer parachuted into Spéth's team in a similar way, as did Csaba Csibrák, only he came from the left: he "strengthened" the board as a representative of the Élhtöbb Diósd Association until the election day (in practice until October).

The results

The voters punished, not in any way. The table below shows the losses in numbers, which is remarkable because not only the number of voters (8060/8806), but also the voter turnout (56.48/66.69) increased by roughly 10 percent compared to 2019. All this means that Géza Spéth was not only unable to increase the number of votes, but she was also unable to retain her own voters - in her stronghold, electoral district No. 1, she lost an unprecedented 62 votes against the candidate of Pro Civitate, so she was only included in the board from a compensation list.

DAVE + ODE	2019	2024
Géza Spéth pm.	1490	1170
Géza Spéth 1. vk.	218	165
Ferenc Czimer 2. vk.	166	260
Dr. Dániel Varga 3. vk.	246	200
Birdman Arnold 4 vk.	220	127
Attila Balogh 5. vk	184	112
Gábor Albitz 6. vk.	1469 (p.m.)	176
Csaba Csibrák 7. vk.	210	93
Tamás Kőhidi 8. vk.	161	70

 

The five-year activity of Géza Spéth and his narrow circle of advisers doomed not only the mayor himself, but also (with one exception) all the members of his team.

The personality cult didn't help, but neither did the ranking of voters

During the campaign, the candidates of both Pro Civitate and the More Livable Diósdért Association competed against the Spéth team in a cultured manner: after 5 embarrassingly fruitless years, the DAVE+ODE association began to attack their opponents personally, and public criticism was handled in an unprecedented way: on social media everyone who expressed their displeasure was banned from Géza Spéth's official page and the website of Diósd City Municipality - just like in the form of an emoji. With this, Mr. Spéth divided Diósd taxpayers into desirable and undesirable groups, and excluded many voters from the pages of public figures and the city, which in many cases are the only channels for information of public interest (e.g. mosquito control).

The mentality of socialism lives with us

The campaign of the Spéth team, in addition to defamation, was exhausted in a single garbage collection - there is no shortage of symbolism - that was the connection to the community, the mayor who was kept in the bubble voluntarily or by others was only connected to his voters by this one event.

Idlely, but proudly, with folded hands.

The new and even newer mayor

On the night of the vote, the NVI side showed a difference of 6 votes in favor of the leftist Anna Makádi, which reduced to 5 by the next morning.

However, the candidate of Pro Civitate drew attention to an election fraud never seen in Diósdon, requesting a recount of the invalid votes of a polling station from the Területi Elektás Bítószág (TVB), the result of which became public on the evening of June 17.

It happened that the contents of a complete mobile ballot box in the 1st electoral district were classified as invalid by the local vote counting committee (SZSZB), illegally, exceeding its powers.

There were votes in the ballot box that were legally and validly cast in the local Szent Anna nursing home with an assistant, there were those that were cast legally and validly without an assistant, and there were those that were cast legally in private residences at other locations in the voting circle.

"According to the protocol, based on the statement of one SZSZB member, 'voters living in the home asked the employee there to help them vote, and not the members of the committee.' In view of this, the SZSZB members voted 7-5 that the integrity of the election was violated and all the ballots in the mobile ballot box were classified as invalid."

However, the legislation reads as follows:

181. § (1) A voter who cannot read, or whose physical disability or other reason prevents him from voting, may use the help of an assistant of his choice, or, failing that, two members of the vote counting committee together.

TVB's decision

The committee notes that, based on Section 184 (1) of the Act, the mobile ballot box will be taken out by two members of the vote counting committee. Paragraph (1) of § 193 lists which ballots are invalid.

The SZSZB does not have the authority to establish grounds for invalidity beyond this. No. 001 SZSZB, operating in the voting district, exceeded its authority when it declared all the ballots in the mobile ballot box invalid.

Since the appeal only requested the recount of the ballots declared invalid with regard to the mayor's ballots, the TVB only examined them.

Based on Section 181 (1) of the Act, a voter who is prevented from voting may use the assistance of the helper of his choice or, failing that, the help of two members of the vote counting committee. Therefore, the decision of the SZSZB, which was "recorded in the extraordinary event minutes" according to which the integrity of the election was damaged by the fact that the elderly voters who used the mobile ballot box chose an assistant in the person of the home's employee, was wrong and exceeded its authority.

The committee opened the mobile ballot box (seal number: 0549459, 0549460), it contained 32 mayoral ballots, which the SZSZB declared invalid. After examining the ballots and counting them twice, the committee determined the following:

• Valid vote for András Dizseri: 26

• Valid vote for Géza Spéth: 3

• Invalid vote: 3

(…)

The data of the minutes on the results of the mayoral election are determined by the committee as follows:

Number of invalid stamped ballots: 137

Number of valid ballots: 5729

Géza Spéth: 1170

András Dizzeri: 2290

Anna Makádi: 2269

Total: 5729

The king died, and the queen soon after, so long live the king!

For the sake of completeness, let us add that the decision is not yet final, although it is hard to imagine that Anna Makádi would find 22 valid votes under any bush.

Featured image: Otthonunk Diósd Egyesület/Facebook