It has not yet been decided who will lead Budapest.

According to the order published on Sunday on the Kúria's website, the board partially changed the previous decision of the National Election Commission (NVB) and ordered the review and recount of all valid votes cast in the mayor's election and the determination of the result of the mayor's election based on the recount of the valid votes.

There is no further legal remedy against the order.

According to Friday's decision of the Constitutional Court, the curia order of June 26 establishing the results of the mayoral election was unconstitutional, so the curia must make a new decision.

The three-member council of the Kúria justified the decision made in the repeated procedure by saying, among other things, that the difference in votes between the candidates was very small (0.005 thousandths), therefore

"in order to protect the purity of the democratic election, the worry-free counting of votes, and the legal and final conclusion of the results of the mayoral election"

it is necessary to recount the valid votes and, based on this, to "determine the result of the mayoral election with content according to any modified results".

According to the Court, however, "in itself, the fact that IV. and VII. a relatively high number of invalid votes were cast in district polling stations compared to the capital city average, which does not support Dávid Vitézy's allegation of voter fraud".

In order to at least make the causal relationship probable, it would also have been necessary to prove that only in these two districts was the crossing with a thin line applied and only in these two districts was the number of invalid votes significantly higher. In addition, it should have been shown that the number of invalid votes was significantly lower in the districts of Budapest where bold strokes were used. In the absence of this, according to the order, the cause-and-effect relationship was not proven.

The Kúria rejected Gergely Karácsony's request to annul the results of the mayoral election and to order a repeat of the election.

They wrote that the applicant "should have explained in detail and substantiated with convincing evidence the violations of law committed during the recount, and also had to prove that these violations significantly influenced the outcome of the mayoral election."

During the local government election, Alexandra Szentkirályi (Fidesz-KDNP) withdrew from the mayoral candidacy. Due to the shortness of time, according to the law on the electoral procedure, it was no longer necessary to produce new ballots, but the candidate had to be deleted from the ballot by crossing out his name.

After the election, there was a dispute about the fact that the polling stations did not delete the withdrawing candidate in the same way, which could have misled the voters. In view of this, the NVB ordered the recount of the invalid votes in all voting districts in the capital, and then determined the result of the mayoral election.

Two candidates (Gergely Karácsony and Dávid Vitézy) submitted a request for judicial review against the NVB's decision establishing the result. The Court upheld the NVB's decision in its ruling, judging the combined applications together.

Dávid Vitézy's request for judicial review had two elements.

On the one hand, he requested that the Curia change the decision of the NVB and order a recount of the valid votes in all voting districts in the capital, on the other hand, he requested the IV and VII. repeating the voting in the district.

Dávid Vitézy filed a constitutional complaint against the Court's order of June 26.

In it, he claimed that his right to vote passively was violated, given that the interpretation and implementation of the legal provision on the cancellation of the eliminated candidate was not uniform, and this also affected the final result of the election, and he also objected that the Court did not justify why it did not deal with the merits with the request of the person proposing the recount.

MTI

Cover image: Gergely Karácsony and Dávid Vitézy, the two mayor candidates
Source: MTI/János Vajda, Attila Kovács