WARSAW – Supporters of the Warsaw mayor, along with dozens of Polish voters and human rights groups, rushed on Thursday to present legal challenges to the validity of Sunday’s presidential election, which narrowly lost to the incumbent, President Andrzej Duda .
The rush to file complaints was the result of a new electoral code approved by the government in May, reducing the time to present such challenges from 14 days to three.
In presenting the official protests to the nation’s Supreme Court, supporters of the mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, did not expect to nullify the election result, given the margin of defeat of nearly half a million votes.
Their aim was more to expose what they said was a pattern of political interference that tarnished the country’s closest elections since the end of the Communist government in 1989 and to delay the certification of the vote long enough for it to be declared invalid.
At least, the challenges will pose a test for a judicial system that has undergone radical changes since the ruling Law and Justice party came to power five years ago. The government has been accused of undermining judicial independence and theoretically faces the possibility of becoming the first nation in the European Union to lose its voting rights.
Mr. Duda appointed Joanna Lemanska, head of the Supreme Court Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs, to rule on the validity of the election. She suggested he would step aside, but has not yet.
Even if challenged, critics believe the special chamber is no longer an impartial arbiter of the law. But by overwhelming judges with complaints, they hope it will be impossible for judges to certify the results with the required 21 days.
Trzaskowski, who has not commented on the legal challenges, is scheduled to deliver a speech in the northern port city of Gdynia on Friday, where he will try to rally anti-government supporters.
Borys Budka, the head of the main opposition party, Civic Platform, said Thursday that there was increasing evidence that the elections were deeply flawed.
“These elections were not the same, they did not meet democratic standards, they were dishonest,” he said. “Therefore, we demand that they be declared invalid.”
The Polish diasporas reported on the most widespread irregularities, and tens of thousands of votes from abroad were potentially unaccounted for. But there were also reports of bizarre results at various nursing homes, reporting that Mr. Duda won 100 percent of the vote, and concerns about additional ballots sent to polling stations without proper documentation.
Cezary Tomczyk, the mayor’s campaign team chief, said they had received reports from all over Poland of ballots that were not properly stamped.
“The result of the election is not only a simple statement of who won, but it also shows respect for every vote cast and could not be cast,” a Polish broadcaster said in an interview on TVN24. “We don’t know the scale of irregularities. This can only be determined by the Supreme Court. “
Her team created a website to help voters file protests, and said several thousand had already been registered.
Some of the most troubling reports came from abroad, where a record 520,000 people had registered to vote before the election, but only 415,951 ballots were counted. Complaints filed with the court accuse the Polish Foreign Ministry of working to suppress the number of voters.
In Britain, more than 30,000 ballots, 16.6 percent, were missing, according to a calculation using public data from the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
With the vote conducted exclusively by mail in Britain due to the pandemic, the Polish Foreign Ministry blamed the British Post Office and the voters themselves for the problems.
Mr. Trzaskowski won the vote by a wide margin, securing 112,207 votes to Mr. Duda’s 32,067.
In Germany, 11,500 ballots did not reach consulates in time to be counted, and similar problems were reported in other countries with large Polish populations.
“We can expect a record number of electoral protests because these elections, in my opinion, have been conducted unfairly,” said Michał Wawrykiewicz, a lawyer for the Free Courts Initiative and the Committee for the Defense of Justice. “Such situations have never occurred before. We have never before been dealing with such massive party propaganda in the public media that it also influenced the outcome of the elections. “
Paulina Kieszkowska-Knapik, who joined her Initiative colleagues on the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon to present her complaint, was thrilled by what she said was a profound injustice.
“The original sin,” he said, “was to hold the elections during a pandemic.” That, he said, was itself a violation of the Constitution.
Adam Bielan, the head of the Law and Justice electoral team, said the claims should be evaluated by the Supreme Court, but that the review would not change the result.
“President Andrzej Duda’s advantage over Rafał Trzaskowski is so great that, even if there had been inconsistencies, they could worry voters for both candidates,” said Gazeta Prawna, a legal newspaper. Other party officials did not return calls seeking comment.
As the deadline for protests approached, volunteers from “Poland Express”, a civic organization based in Britain, helped foreign voters register complaints on time.
More than 2,900 people joined a Facebook group called “Election Protests: Poland has the right to vote.” The grassroots initiative created forms for voters to fill out dating abuses, such as the voting package arriving too late or not arriving.
Separately, protests arose over the use of state television to drive Duda’s campaign.
The handling of the protests by the Supreme Court will be closely watched.
In the days between the first round of elections and the runoff contest on Sunday, the European Union Court of Justice heard arguments in one of several cases related to Poland’s changes in the judicial system, which critics said were designed to nullify the independence of the courts.
“The entire EU judicial system cannot function if the courts are not independent,” said Michal Gajdus at the Luxembourg-based European court.
Since 1989, judges in Poland had been selected by the National Council of the Judiciary. But in 2017, Duda signed changes to the law that critics say would allow the president to appoint sympathetic judges for the Law and Justice party.
The changes prompted the European Commission to activate Article 7 of the Treaty on the European Union, the so-called nuclear option that could result in Poland losing its voting rights. But since that would require a unanimous vote from the 27 EU member countries, it is not likely to happen.
Monika Pronczuk and Anatol Magdziarz contributed reports.
