In a historic decision, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the results of the first round of voting in the presidential election amid accusations of Russian interference.
As a result, the second round of voting, which was scheduled for December 8, 2024, will no longer take place. Kellyn Georgescu, who won the first round, reported the verdict as an “official coup” and an attack on democracy.
“The electoral process for the Romanian presidential elections will be resumed in full, the government will set a new date for the Romanian presidential elections, as well as a new calendar program to carry out the necessary actions. ”, Constitutional Court of Romania said.
The judiciary said the decision was taken in accordance with Article 146(f) of the Constitution, stressing the need to ensure the fairness and legality of the electoral process. The decision is final and binding.
The development comes days after the declassified documents released the Romanian government accused a pro-Russian influence campaign that used a network of 25,000 accounts on the social media platform TikTok to promote Georgescu in a coordinated effort.
However, it is currently unclear from the document whether Georgescu knew about or assisted in the alleged campaign. Russia has refused any interference in the electoral process.
Separately, the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) revealed that the EU and NATO member state was the target of more than 85,000 intrusion attempts before and during the first round of elections, which were aimed at accessing election websites. and IT systems.
“The modus operandi, as well as the scale of the cyber campaign, suggest that the attacker possesses significant resources consistent with the modus operandi of a state-sponsored attacker,” SRI said.
This was announced on Friday by the press secretary of the US State Department, Matthew Miller said: “Romanians must be sure that their elections reflect the democratic will of the Romanian people and are not subject to foreign influence aimed at undermining the fairness of their elections.”
The European Commission in a press statement on Thursday said it had stepped up monitoring of TikTok, calling on the platform to “freeze and preserve data related to actual or foreseeable systemic risks that its service may pose to electoral processes and civil discourse in the EU”.
To that end, it has been asked to preserve internal documents and information relating to the design and operation of its recommendation systems, in addition to details of how it addresses the risk of deliberate manipulation through a technique called coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB).
Development comes as TikTok revealed This week at the end of November 2024. two small clusters were stopped, each containing 78 and 12 accounts respectively, secretly campaigning for Georgescu and the independent political candidate Mircea Joanne.
Back in September, the social network service was popular said it took down a network of 22 accounts operating from Romania that were found to be using fake accounts to spread disinformation and spread narratives critical of the government. The network had a total of 300,000 followers between them.
“The networks we identified specifically targeting the Romanian elections have so far been small operations coordinated through TikTok operating domestically,” the report said. “We also take a close look at off-platform activity to prevent covert influence operations and fraudulent behavior.”
