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Comment by 6P58r3MXJSLi | Hacker News Reader

> almost got a cultist Neo-Nazi elected in Romania thanks to tiktok.

please stop spreading lies.

The Romanian supreme court presented no evidence and instead cancelled the election results while the election were still going on (citizen living abroad were still voting)

It was just an excuse to stop something NATO did not like from happening and I am saying it as a very left leaning person, anti-fascist and anti-Putin.

What happened in Romania is a pure and simple coup d'etat with no military intervention.

Besides: if tik tok could really win elections in EU, it means our democracies aren't remotely as strong as we like to believe.

And if that's true, imagine what the US can do, having by far the largest budget for these kinds of operations in the entire World.

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TikTok made a difference in Romania because Romania is the poster child for countries that should not be using "top 2 advance to the next round" voting.

They had 10 parties and 4 independents that split the vote. In that particular election there were 6 right wing parties that collectively got 47% of the vote. The top 3 of those got 19.18%, 13.86%, and 8.79% of the vote.

The highest non-right party got 19.15% of the vote.

Georgescu's TikTok campaign just needed to get more than 19.15% of the vote to get to the top 2 round. He got 22.94%.

With the number of parties they have and the lack of any parties that come anywhere near majority support they really need to be using ranked choice voting or something similar.

> TikTok made a difference in Romania

replace Tik Tok with any other social network, that serve much more people, have much more penetration in Europe and have much larger budgets at their disposal and you will see how Tik Tok is a red herring in Romania.

It's just that democracy is good only when the "right" candidate wins.

In my Country the USA have controlled the results of the elections for 50 years, often relying on blackops, infiltrated intelligence, fabricated propaganda, reactionary movements, funding terrorism and in the process killing hundreds of innocent people.

It's nothing new to us in Europe.

this is so much BS. it's not the job of the supreme court to present evidence

> it's not the job of the supreme court to present evidence

I think you meant to say that it is not the job of any supreme court to cancel free elections without evidence.

I dare you to quote the documents that link the win of Georgescu to Russian propaganda.

I am not saying Georgescu wasn't helped by Russia, I am saying there is absolutely no evidence, and if an election can be bought with a couple hundred thousands dollars spent on tik tok, are you implying I could win the elections in Romania?

It is that weak the state of democracy there?

Imagine what the US could do there, having tens of billions at their disposal.

Who said anything about Russia. He broke election laws.

Again, it's not the job of any court anywhere in the world to present evidence

> He broke election laws.

Allegedly.

It must be noted that

On 2 December, following a court-ordered recount of nearly nine million ballots, the Court validated the results of the first round of elections, certifying Călin Georgescu and Elena-Valerica Lasconi as the candidates for the second round.

The Court emphasized that annulment under Article 52(1) of Law No. 370/2004 requires clear evidence of fraud or irregularities capable of altering the assignment of mandates or candidate rankings, a threshold not met in this case

---

The votes were already re-counted and validate, moreover the court said there are no evidence of large frauds, not enough to justify an annulment, the same court that few days later actually annulled them. Isn't it suspicious to you?

And again: you're trying to move the goalpost here, the court doesn't have to provide evidence, they have to evaluate the evidence, and, by their words, *there is no evidence* of fraud.

In other news, Trump broke elections laws too (allegedly), are the US elections irregular?

In my country at every election turn there are accusations of breaking the election laws, and some irregularities are effectively happening, that does not invalidate the elections.

The will of the people is paramount and the supreme court is a servant of the people, it's not an absolute emperor nor it's their dad.

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