Thousands of Romanians have rallied on Facebook and plan to go to the streets asking for a vote recount in Bucharest's District 1 where suspicion emerged about the correctness of the vote counting process in the local elections on Sunday, June 5.

Clotilde Armand, the Frenchwoman who narrowly lost the mayor seat in Bucharest’s richest district (District 1) and the Save Bucharest Union – USB party, which supported her in the elections, were the first to point out that there might have been some statistical anomalies in the local elections’ results. They’ve even asked for a vote recount in 18 polling stations in Bucharest’s District 1, but the constituency electoral bureau in District 1 rejected their request.

Soon after the electoral bureau's decision an event page was created on Facebook, which aims to gather people for a protest in Bucharest's University Square this weekend.

“We’ll meet on Saturday at 15:00 to defend the rule of law. The democratic process is undermined if the voting process is rigged. We urgently request for a vote recount to preserve the integrity of the democratic process, both in Romania and in the country’s relations with the EU Member States, and outside the borders of EU countries,” reads the presentation of the event organized on Facebook.

Some 3,200 people have already confirmed they would be going to this protest while some 8,000 others have shown interest in the event.

Meanwhile, local media has been writing about other irregularities in Sunday's local elections.

Local Gandul.info reports that there are some discrepancies between the number of ballots the polling stations declared as received and the number of ballots actually counted at the polling stations. Specifically, in some cases, the citizens’ valid votes, together with the number of invalid votes and the number of unused ballots don’t coincide with the total number of ballots the polling stations received.

Some 250,000 ballots are missing from the Central Electoral Bureau BEC’s Excel table that comprises the provisional results for Bucharest, reports Gandul. Inconsistencies seem to appear at polling stations in all sectors and not just to the ballots for general mayor, but also to those for district mayor, local council, and general council. In District 1, more than 10,000 ballots for district mayor are missing according to calculations made at the polling stations in this district, as they appear on BEC’s website.

An online petition that asks a vote recount in Bucharest’s District 1 and a criminal investigation in this case has also been launched.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com