The counting and centralization of votes in District 1 has ended, sources told mass media. After three days of scandal and tensions, George Tuță, the PSD-PNL candidate won the mayor’s office with only about 500 votes in front of the current mayor, Clotilde Armand, according to data centralized by the Electoral Office. In District 2, where there were similar problems, the final results of Sunday’s vote are still pending.
Also, the Central Electoral Bureau rejected, as unfounded, the request to cancel the local elections in Sector 1, made by Clotilde Armand, as a candidate for the position of mayor of the sector from the United Right Alliance. BEC argued that “the petitioner’s reports do not include other reasons and are not accompanied by evidence to prove them”.
According to the data centralized by Central Electoral Bureau (BEC), Tuță obtained 36.61% of the votes, and Clotilde Armand, 35.92% of the votes. Clotilde Armand yet continued to accuse that her votes were deducted “from the pen”.
“In a single rechecked section, we recovered 185 votes. Only one and 166. More than 1000 cannot be found and several hundred other minutes are modified from the pen without the respective votes being counted. I have submitted over 80 recount requests and have received no response from BEC. Everyone’s involvement is needed so that the votes in District 1 can be recounted,” Armand posted this morning on Facebook.
In retort, Tuță repeatedly said that the counting was done correctly. “Each of us can do this simple arithmetic, add up the votes, realize that they are correct. We made this calculation, we didn’t take into account the pictures that Mrs. Armand puts up, but, on the contrary, we took the data from the official platform of AEP, where for the most part they were correct, including the minutes. We did the calculations on the correct data,” he said.
As for the District 2 dispute, the counting has not ended yet. There are still 3 polling stations to be counted and it is expected that today, around noon, the situation will be concluded.
This morning, both the mayor of Sector 2, Radu Mihaiu, and the councilor of Sector 1, Clotilde Armand, candidates for a new mandate from the United Right Alliance, announced that they recovered several hundred votes.
Mihaiu announced on Thursday night that, following the recounts carried out in two sections, he recovered almost 300 votes.
One of these is Section no. 352, where the 333 votes obtained by Radu Mihaiu were reversed, in the minutes, with those of an opposing candidate. Those from the polling station had recognized the mistake and asked for its correction.
“Section 352 has been counted. Documented incident. We end a long and hard day, but it was worth it. 294 votes from you have been published. 294 more votes from only 2 sections recounted today. But I’m not done. There are still 30 sections to recount. 30 sections with serious suspicions that PSD PNL keeps under wraps because they also know they are losing,” Mihaiu wrote on Facebook.
In a previous post, Radu Mihaiu accused irregularities in Section 203, where seven votes in his favor were allegedly mixed up in other piles, and his opponent, Rareş Hopincă (PSD), actually had 25 fewer votes than was initially counted.
Clotilde Armand also announced the “recovery” of 185 votes in the District 1 polling stations. “In a single rechecked section, we recovered 185 votes. Only one and 166. More than 1,000 cannot be found, and several hundred other minutes are modified from the pen without the respective votes being counted. I have submitted more than 80 recount requests and have not received any response from the district electoral bureau. Everyone’s involvement is needed to be able to recount the votes in Sector 1,” Armand said.