This is the next part of the previous post: Reconstruction – An English Version – Part 1
Please, share both of them!
________
The third level might have originally been planned as a contingency plan in case the first two levels ‘fail’. The participation rate turned out to be very high from the early hours on, and all previous estimations suggested that a high participation was unfavourable for FIDESZ, and might even drop their result below 50% mark. (23) At this point the homepage of NVI, the Hungarian national electoral management body started to flicker and became inaccessible due to technical problems. Around 3 pm two major events happened. Large standby police capacities were mobilized and directed to Budapest, (24) and FIDESZ called for an emergency panel meeting. (This might have been the point when the decision has been taken to resort to the contingency plan.) However in the streets there is still euphory, people are enthusiastically urging each other to participate. The first strange signs started to appear around 5 pm but were noticed by very few people: there seemed to be a significant slow-down in the participation rate according to the figures officially announced. The last interim record at 6:30 pm showed an even slower increase in participation figures, and for the first time it seemed realistic that the rate could remain below 70%. And then really strange things started to happen. The official participation rate announced at 7 pm was lower than the previous one published at 6:30. At the official closing time (7 pm) everyone was paying attention to the few polling stations with still huge queues of people wanting to vote. The NVI headquarters got cordonned off by police (25), and there was also an extremely high level of police presence around the Parliament. (26)
In possession of the estimations from their delegates the opposition is still optimistic, and most FIDESZ candidates are very cautious. The official election website is still down, and NVI officers give a reason for the technical problems: “the server had crashed and had to be replaced by an older standby server”. (27), (28). To journalists asking if the system had been audited in any way, NVI chair Ilona Pálffy replied “You see, I am a retired lady, I am bad at computers, this is the task of the informaticians”. (Is this an adequate response from a person responsible for the whole electoral process? But her current position also seems to be in conflict with her past roles in all previous cabinets lead by Viktor Orbán (29)). Ilona Pálffy also explained the delay in disclosing early results by the fact that the poll was still going on, beyond the official closing time, in the last stations with long queues. However, it has been pointed out promptly that there is no regulation -- even in the electoral law customized by FIDESZ -- that would prohibit disclosing results after the official closing time (30). In response to journalists’ questions about responsibilities for this apparently bad organization Ilona Pállfy blamed the government. But this statement was refuted in a few minutes by the government, pointing out that NVI has the sole responsibility for any organizational issues. Near 10 pm there is an apparent change in the behaviour of FIDESZ candidates: they start to become self-assured. And all of sudden more than 5 hours after the official poll closing time, the first (but already nearly final) results suddenly appear from the blue: FIDESZ wins approximately 2/3 of the parliament seats, which means a constitutional majority in Hungary.
After closing time, polling station officials also experience strange things. There are many well documented stories, (31), (32) all following a common pattern: officials were kept waiting (or even locked in) in the stations, while the NVI centre was not responding to any communication attempts. Results had to be checked with the centre first, then came a lengthy verification process, before they received a permission to “sign” the final version of the station reports and leave the place. Breaking both with previous practice and legal prescriptions, the delegated officials were not allowed to be there in person when their figures were entered into the computer system. Several experienced officials reported serious concerns about the transparency of the process, which they never experienced during the last 28 years.
As a response to these irregularities, the parties of the opposition started to wake up from their initial paralysis, and started to demand the original (hand-written) station reports from the NVI. NVI first denied access to these reports claiming that they will be inaccessible for a week, (33) then on Wednesday afternoon they suddenly handed half of the pdf documents to the parties (the reports on votes for candidates, ), which was followed by the other half on Thursday (the reports on party-votes, (34)). The opposition parties called for grassroot movements to compare the scanned documents with the figures published on the NVI website. Polling officials delegated by the opposition could make a copy (or photograph) of the original versions of the station reports before submission, so they were also comparing the new pdf to the old ones. This way several serious electoral mistakes have been discovered (e.g. the voters for an opposition party have been assigned to a scam party in the line above or below -- which virtually never happened for the FIDESZ,(35)). A bizarre calculation rule for correcting ‘irregularities’ in the number of votes lead to deducing disproportionally more votes from the opposition parties than from the FIDESZ. (36) According to some quick calculations these excess ballots could amount to several 10000 votes at a national scale, which can even mean ~1% of the votes.
There are many guesses in the social media about further manipulations concerning computer system. Nevertheless, that system only performs mathematical additions, so the outputs can be easily verified later on, and any fraud could be easily caught. If either the mathematical operations would be biased, or the numbers fed into the system would not match the ones appearing in the official polling reports, the manipulations would certainly be spotted sooner or later.
From this point on, what follows is a hypothesis of a plausible scenario of what might have happened during and after the polling day. The key point here is the two thirds of the ~11000 polling stations that completely lacked independent officials not subordinate to the FIDESZ government. These stations completely lack any external control. What the government claims to have been happened there, is what ‘happened’ there. After the decision for the contingency plan (level 3), NVI gets a strong police protection. Results from stations with independent delegates were dealt with first. The polling stations without any independent observers are meanwhile (A) either kept waiting or (B) asked to produce a blank report, or (C) maybe they just submit something without any evidence (photographs or photocopies of what’s been submitted). After most of the results have been received a clever software calculates the figures that need to be put into the cells for the stations without any independent control, so that each individual figure could be still believable, but they would all together add up to the desired result. When Mr Orbán was satisfied with the outcomes, then the figures were dictated back to the polling stations (case 1), or the blank reports started to get filled (case 2), the results got announced by NVI, and Mr Orbán and Mr Semjén could sing their victory song (37).
During the weekend and the first two days of the next week, the polling reports were all verified, or new originals were created (case 3). After everything seemed fine the (scanned copies of the) handwritten ‘original’ reports could be safely handed over to the parties of the opposition. Of course with a few relatively minor mistakes/miscalculations, so that they could have something to chew on (anyway, the original reports from the stations with independent staff already provided a lot of such mistakes). And the regeneration of the “original” ballot sheets is probably taking place now, in order that they would be well-prepared for an eventual recount.
(23) http://www.atv.hu/…/20180407-friss-felmeres-veszelyben-a-fi…
(24) https://444.hu/…/az-m7-esen-es-az-m3-ason-is-a-fovaros-fele…
(25) http://hvg.hu/…/20180408_A_szavazok_megereztek_a_v…/pp/68163
(26) https://index.hu/…/komoly_a_rendori_keszultseg_a_parlament…/
(27) https://hirtv.hu/…/a-valasztasi-iroda-honlapjat-meg-mindig-…
(28) https://444.hu/…/az-nvi-informatikai-rendszerenek-furcsasag…
(29) https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A1lffy_Ilona
(30) https://index.hu/…/a_valasztas_furcsasagairol_beszelt_a_hi…/
(31) e.g. http://hvg.hu/…/20180411_A_veteran_szavazatszamlalo_is_megd…
(32) e.g. https://444.hu/…/a-fideszes-szavazokori-delegaltakat-is-mag…
)
(33) https://24.hu/…/egy-egesz-hetre-eltuntek-a-valasztasi-jegy…/
(34) https://444.hu/…/felkerultek-a-beszkennelt-jegyzokonyvek-az…
(35) http://hvg.hu/…/20180411_Itt_a_magyarazat_faradtak_voltak_a…
(36) https://index.hu/…/hogyan_nullazodhattak_az_ellenzeki_szav…/
(37) http://propeller.hu/…/3345761-video-igy-fakadt-dalra-orban-…
As said before this is just speculation, there is little evidence behind this scenario so far. However, all the the strange events and little bits of informations fit nicely into this picture, and this makes it an incredibly plausible and powerful scenario. Let’s have a quick recapitulation on these clues:
Is it plausible that a system developed from several million euros suddenly stops without any extraordinary event? This system was designed to operate only for this very moment. It has been scaled for exactly this type of use, this magnitude of load. Or could this be nothing more then a pretext to replace the software to a non-audited one, and do some “reverse engineering”?
Let’s assume that such an accident in fact could happen. This alone could raise a lot of concerns, and seriously erode public trust in the fairness of the elections. Thus it would be of vital importance for NVI to seek an external audit, exposing its computers to external experts. As this has not happened, and all traces could have been cleaned up since then. Ilona Pálffy refused to hand out log files of the audited software to Litresits András, an NVI member delegated by the party MSZP. (38) Would it not have been in her interest to hand the logfiles over if everything was going fair and square? A prompt disclosure of the log could have lifted all concerns raised by the intransparency caused by the website outage.
For the same reason it should be of vital interest for NVI to disclose the scanned station reports as soon as possible. Was there a reason for which they had to be kept secret for four days? All explanations are hilarious, with good organisation the necessary scanning could have been performed during the polling day (e.g. in the electoral centres of the constituencies, in parallel with the submission of the results).
It has been mentioned several times that polling officials had to check the outcomes of the vote counting with the NVI centre, before they received a permission to put them on paper. But what is the purpose of the ballot reports? Should not they just record what has happened in the station? Why do they have to get a “permission” to put down what they experienced? Is this post-hoc ‘harmonization’ of the local records a common practice in Europe? (And even the correction for “irregularities” in the number of votes was performed in a highly intransparent way. The official station report should give a precise account of the number of votes found in the ballot -- and any corrections should have been applied in subsequent steps!)
Why could NVI not find a better solution for handling the transferred voters in Budapest? The number of voters to be expected was perfectly known to them. Maybe there had to be some pretext for the four hours without results? Ms Pálffy also gave an overtly false explanation around 60 minutes after the ballot close, that all of the stations are still counting the votes. In many rural stations there were only 10-20 voters. Is this believable?
What was the reason for isolating the NVI building nearly hermetically (strengthened police forces, webpage freezing, unresponsive phone lines) throughout the evening and night of the polling day???
Many independent polling officials reported that they were not given access to the process of recording the results in the central system in the regional electoral offices of the constituencies. This previously unprecedented practice was clearly against the law. Could they disturb someone in doing something?
The geometric accuracy with which FIDESZ got nearly exactly the right number of votes for a constitutional majority can also be considered, well, suspicious.
For whatever they are worth it is important to note that there were some unverified leaks from people who had been witnessing or participating in the scheme. (39.) On Tuesday an anonymous informatician called in to a discussion program in the last free radio station of Hungary, who claimed to have participated in the fraud, and gave a concise and understandable description of the process. (40)
During the last four years all major byelections were won by the opposition by a relatively large margin. The last victory was in February in Hódmezővásárhely, where an emblematic FIDESZ leader (János Lázár, deputy prime minister) was defeated by 16% points against an independent candidate supported by the whole opposition. (41) The only explicit difference between the byelections and this general elections is that during the byelections the opposition was always able to delegate candidates to all of the polling stations, whereas now they could not find enough delegates to be present everywhere.
(38) https://444.hu/…/az-nvi-informatikai-rendszerenek-furcsasag…
(39) e.g. https://civilhetes.net/keleti-gyorgyi-a-valos-eredmenyt-elc…
(40) https://clyp.it/srtiq1qm
(41) https://www.theguardian.com/…/hungary-surprise-defeat-for-v…
