If they cannot convingly explain this mishap, they need to recount the election counts. Austria is not 3rd world dictatorship as Turkey or the USA with such ridiculities.
Yet, in the run up to this (party leadership) election, it was far from clear exactly who the ca 600 voters actually were. None of the candidates apparently knew!
The winner is Andreas Babler who is firmly on the left wing of his party.
On 24th May he gave two TV interviews. In the first interview, prerecorded and broadbast on the Puls24 channel, he said "I'm a Marxist".
In the second (live) interview on another channel later that day he was asked about his statement from earlier on, he answered "I really don't understand the excitement".
The interviewer (Armin Wolf) then challenged him about what Marxism means and whether Marxism is something that a majority of Austrian voters could support. At this point Babler backed off.
Interviewer: "So you're not a Marxist after all?" Babler: "No, not at all. If you interpret it that way."
In the latter interview, Wolf challenged Babler, pointing out that Marxism is associated with both "expropriation" and "the dictatorship of the proletariat".
To many people, those are pretty wild ideas, although apparently much less so for SPÖ members?
Guess time will tell what the Austrian voters at large actually think, their national elections aren't due until Autumn 2024...
Year Die Linke/PDS
2021 4.9%
2017 9.2%
2013 8.6%
2009 11.9%
2005 8.7%
2002 4.0%
1998 5.1%
1994 4.4%
1990 2.4%
So it's quite fashionable to call oneself marxist nowadays in Austria, even if he was from the centre-left SPOe, not the true KPOe.
In the regional (state) elections in Salzburg in April 2023 the results look quite different:
ÖVP (centre right) 30.4%
FPÖ (further right) 25.7%
SPÖ (centre left) 17.9%
KPÖ (further left) 11.7%
Greens 8.2%
Neos 4.2%
The party Die Linke also does not explicitly tie itself to a single leftist ideology. You'll find anarchists, Marxists-Leninists and Trotskyists, both radical social progressives campaigning for ongoing civil rights issues and social conservatives worrying about alienating reactionaries. This creates a lot of potential for "democratic discourse" or "in-fighting" (depending on which bias you prefer). It has also allowed the party to receive "protest votes", although those are now more associated with the far-right (and regionally right-wing extremist) AfD.
Imagine if that happened in 92 back in the states.
If by dictatorship you mean the military coups from its history -- that is an interesting and unique-in-the-world situation where Atatürk granted power to the military to overthrow the government if they strayed too far from his Kemalist ideal of the republic, probably the only coups in human history which the end goal was to force the people to have another election (with the not so subtle threat to not make them have to come back again -- this is the origin of the term "deep state" which became popularized in the US recently)
Now there is evidence that the US had a hand in some of the original (pre-2016) coups.
I would be wary to oversimplify Turkish politics.
That said, as far as I followed the story, the (actual) winning candidate insisted on a thorough investigation and full recount. The (actual) losing candidate immediately accepted his defeat and did not object to the new outcome. As transfers of power go, this one was fairly smooth.
we will see.
[1] https://misenategopcdn.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/99/doccume...
Republican Trump-supporting committee chair McBroom summarized the above report, saying,
“Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.... There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”
McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”