Austrian presidential election result overturned and must be held again

[brooklynite]

Source: The Guardian

Austria’s Freedom party will get another go at providing the first far-right president in the European Union, after the country’s constitutional court on Friday annulled the result of May’s presidential election.

The court president, Gerhart Holzinger, announced on Friday that the run-off vote, in which Norbert Hofer of the Freedom party (FPÖ) narrowly lost to Green-backed Alexander Van der Bellen, would have to be repeated across the whole country after an investigation revealed irregularities in the count of the vote in several constituencies.

The unprecedented ruling comes a week before Van der Bellen was due to be sworn into office.

Hofer had lost out to his rival in a knife-edge election on 22 May, with a majority of only 30,863 votes.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/austrian-presidential-election-result-overturned-and-must-be-held-again-hofer-van-der-bellen

[pampango]

1. First Brexit now a rerun of the Austrian in which the far-right barely lost. Conservatives are

partying all over the continent. The Austrian far-right should be really fired up for this. Is "Aus-exit" next?

[merrily]

2. I cannot even imagine an election re-do in the US because of "irregularities."

And, if it did, the SCOTUS might just overturn it.

[Yo_Mama]

3. It's their law, not ours. Theirs says that if there are irregularities and there is any

question that they may have affected the outcome, the election will be redone.

Our legal remedies involve recounts.

I knew this was under discussion, because reporters immediately reported sloppiness/mishandling, and it was in multiple districts. Stuff like counting ballots before they should have been, etc.

I guess the court made the decision precisely because the election was so close. I'm still surprised.

Edited to add:
I looked the story up - apparently there were irregularities cited in 94 out of 117 voting districts.

Over 500,000 mail-in ballots were not handled as prescribed by law. That's more than ten times the margin of victory. No one really seems to suspect that there was fraud - just a culture of sloppiness.

https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.faz.net%2Faktuell%2Fpolitik%2Fausland%2Fgerichtsentscheid-praesidentenwahl-in-oesterreich-muss-wiederholt-werden-14318693.html&edit-text=

The kicker is that a European organization is now going to oversee the presidential election in Austria!!!