Alleged misinformation and preferential treatment on TikTok leads to an election rerun. 
Romania Election Annulled Over Misinformation
The BBC reports Romanian Court Annuls Result of Presidential Election First Round
Romania’s constitutional court has annulled the result of the first round of voting in the presidential election just days before the second round was due to take place.
It means the process will be restarted from scratch, with the government due to decide a date for a new vote.
The first round was won by Calin Georgescu, an almost unknown far-right Nato-sceptic who has previously praised Vladimir Putin.
The court’s decision comes after intelligence documents were declassified, suggesting Georgescu benefitted from a mass influence operation – conducted from abroad – to interfere with the result of the vote.
Hours after the court’s decision, Georgescu told a Romanian TV channel that the country’s democracy was “under attack”, describing the verdict as a “formalised coup d’etat”.
Outgoing Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said the court’s decision to annul was “the only correct solution after the declassification of the documents… which show that the result of the Romanians’ vote was blatantly distorted as a result of Russia’s intervention”.
Last week, the court had ordered a recount of votes cast in Sunday’s first round following allegations that social media platform TikTok gave “preferential treatment” to the surprise winner, Calin Georgescu.
Georgescu, a radical with no party of his own, campaigned mainly on TikTok. The platform said it was “categorically false to claim his account was treated differently to any other candidate”.
He won 23% of the vote, with 19%, Elena Lasconi, of the opposition Save Romania Union and Ciolacu of the governing Social Democrats in third.
Lasconi condemned the court’s ruling as “illegal” and “immoral”, saying “today is the moment when the Romanian state has trampled on democracy”.
“Whether we like it or not, from a legal and legitimate point of view, nine million Romanian citizens, both in the country and in the diaspora, have expressed their preference for a certain candidate. We cannot ignore their will!” she said.
She had been hoping to win the second round run-off on Sunday, which has now been cancelled.
Hoot of the Day
You know the case is rigged when:
1) a recount fails 2) the court then steps in and annuls the election on grounds of misinformation and 3) even the opposition admits the court’s ruling is “illegal” and “immoral”.
Mercy!
If misinformation was grounds for an election rerun, there would never be an election anywhere.
Meanwhile, back in the states ….
The GOP’s 2025 Budget Reconciliation Fight, Go Small or Big Bang?
In case you missed it, please see The GOP’s 2025 Budget Reconciliation Fight, Go Small or Big Bang?
Republicans have two shots at budget reconciliation bills in 2025. What should those bills include?
A Tiny Republican Majority
For more on the legislative issues facing Republicans, please see A Tiny Republican Majority in the House Will Make Legislation Difficult
Republicans will not be able to pass much of anything if Trump tries to deliver his campaign promises like no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, and no tax on overtime.
Yesterday, I commented On Meet the Press, Trump Said He “Wants the Illegal Dreamers to Stay”
Trump’s interview on Meet the Press sounds exactly like the deportation strategy I proposed.
There is an easy deal to be had. Trump gets more money for a wall, more money for border agents, more money for ICE, in return for amnesty for dreamers.
Eastern Europe not big fans of the Soviets, err, I mean Russians. A guy who has no party and runs on TikTok getting 23% of the vote either means a lot of Romanians think all the status quo pols suck, a lot of Romanians don’t think at all, where here its more like 30%, or it actually was a well orchestrated Russian influence op. So no, its not just a case of so called misinformation.
You are a fantasist.
It’s a typical tactic of a failed unpopular establishment to invent external bogeymen to blame for their own incompetence and lack of electoral appeal.
What are they going to do? Keep running elections until they get the “right” answer?! Why bother having elections at all if you can’t take losing.
Be honest, just “protect the voters from themselves” by establishing a “liberal democratic” one-party state.
That’s “democracy”, isn’t it?!.
The EU oligarchy cannot tolerate any more dissent, which is more than likely backed by the US.
Those types of shenanigans will one day become more overt in the US. Right now they try to fly under the radar.
Anyone with half a brain can connect the dots but with the dumbing down of society many are lacking half a brain. Those that can figure it out are labeled as a threat to democracy or simply a tin-foil lunatic. Discrediting your competition is the oldest and most effective game.
It is impossible to overstate the influence NATO has in these EU so-called democracies when push comes to shove.
The Moldova election was very suspect, selectively disenfranchising emigré votes. In Georgia they are attempting a color revolution (with EU politicians among the protesters, one third of which are not Georgian according to arrest records). The Italian cabinet was removed, as was the the Greek cabinet, when they threatened to take a course contrary to the EU. In Germany and France and Belgium they are manipulating the political process to keep popular representation behind a cordon sanitaire.
All this harping about how we are a community of values when people in these countries think of themselves as a community of fellow countrymen.
Democracy, EU-style.
You vote until the “correct” result is obtained.
One man’s populism is another man’s misinformation
It’s only democracy if people vote the right way. To the Democrat Party, “our democracy” doesn’t mean our democracy. It is code for Democrat Party rule, not majority rule. The media parrot “attack on our democracy” or “threat to our democracy” as Democrat Party member talking point disinformation.
You don’t seem to understand that Russia has a democracy, Iran has a democracy, and Hungary has a democracy. But not all democracies are created equal. The United States created the first truly representative democracy governed by a constitution with ideals and the assumption that each branch of government acts based upon their constitutional responsibility of checks and balances on the other branches, with no one branch holding superior power over the other. If the electorate itself can be manipulated by misinformation and propaganda at scale as can happen today though social media and non-liberal democracies actors, state actors or otherwise, have access to the means of spreading misinformation/propaganda at scale to swing an election toward a candidate who is anti-liberal democracy, the liberal democracy must take actions to neutralize such threats. Our nation has prospered for well over 200 years with two primary political parties who shared the ideals and respected the norms expected with our version of democracy, but competed and sparred vigorously with different policies and means of achieving the same ideals. It is only when a person or group of persons with the stated object of shattering norms and upending the very ideals that spawned out version of democracy that actions need to be taken to keep the democracy within certain guardrails of ethics, morals, ideals.
I remember Obama speaking in Britain to interfere in the Brexit election. Jamie Dimon also warned his London employees what might happen to their jobs if Brexit won. (Don’t vote the wrong way). Not the action of liberal democracy actors. Within the U.S. Obama said he was going to fundamentally change America. He intended to shatter norms. Under him, the FBI spied on his party’s political opponent in 2016 and his former VP weaponized the justice system against him in 2024. Ethics, morals and ideals have been thrown out the window under a group of persons in the Democrat Party.
Both Cambridge Analytic a and Russia was very active in pushing misinformation to the U.K. voters ahead of the Brexit vote. In retrospect that extremely consequential vote has been a mistake for the U.K. Yes, Obama did want to fundamentally change America for the better. We are the only advanced democracy in the world without universal healthcare. Our healthcare system is by far the most expensive for our citizens and provides at best no better health outcomes. He wanted to fundamentally change this. Our marginalized citizens, such as homosexuals had less rights in the U.S. in 2008 than in most advanced democracies. He fundamentally changed this. Our democratic experiment, as envisioned by our founders counted on continual change/improvement which moves the country closer to the ideals that motivated the writing of the constitution. Regarding the FBI, do you think that just because someone is a political candidate that law enforcement and the intelligence community should not investigate and follow-up on what viewed as potential foreign entanglements and/or past behavior by senior campaign officials pertaining to relationships with persons with allegiances to foreign adversaries. Personally, I want the FBI and intelligence services protecting us against foreign interference in our democracy.
Barry O. is that you?
That’s why we need to abandon democracy and have liberal woke technocratic police states!
Hungary is not like Iran, you idiot.
Stop trying to pretend it is just because the people don’t elect extreme leftist cryptofascist nutjobs that you support.
Liberal democracies need to wake up to the fact that they are being hacked by ill-liberal forces which are directly or indirectly being bolstered by anti-democratic autocrat led nations around the world (e.g. Russia, China, and Iran). You cannot have a functional democracy if the electorate cannot distinguish fact/truth from misinformation. The enemies of liberal democracy are using the freedoms which characterize liberal democracy against it. The blueprint for this was written by Hungary’s Victor Orban. Study how Orban has consolidated power, neutralized media and academic critics, and pushed through changes to the judiciary and election laws to ensure his power remains largely unchecked. He did this all over the last 10 years within an EU member nation that is also a member of NATO. It is long past time for liberal democracies to crack down on what is happening before more liberal democracies are lost like what happened in Hungary.
And by misinformation, you actually mean inconvenient facts that disprove the liberal narrative and shibboleths.
You apparently live in a bubble. What we are seeing on social media ahead of elections is not only happening here. It is happening throughout Europe and for the most part can be traced to foreign actors from authoritarian nations and is designed to promote far right political candidates and parties and smear the mainstream political parties and candidates. This is worldwide, not just here and not just related to our two parties. This is a concerted effort by our adversaries to sow discontent and introduce chaos and disfunction into the liberal democracies around the world.
You are in a cult, that’s why you’re always right and everyone else is always wrong, isn’t it.
Engineering democracy.
It is not permitted to grow organically.
Reminds me of when Hamas was elected to represent the Palestinians in an internationally monitored open election some years ago. Unfortunately that was not the result that the Americans, Israel and EU wanted. So they’ve tried to “annul” the result with several wars and pogroms.
If government was left to grow in an organic way, driven by the IQ 100 masses, you get an IQ 100 government. In today’s environment, it would be driven by low cost blasting of misinformation and lies by sectarian demagogues aimed and us/them politics and hate.
Sound familiar?
The outcome won’t be good. The mainstream is never correct
This is in fact why we do not have a “true” democracy but rather a representative democratic republic. The Founding Fathers knew that a “true democracy” is a recipe for chaos and dissolution.
Well, election results are genuinely suspicious. This guy do not have party behind him, very few voters in polls admitted they support him.
Imagine that you would suddenly learn that both Harris and Trump lost presidential elections, but Jill Stein (of US Green Party, yes there is such thing, no joke) suddenly won.
Can someone mobilize 23% pissed-off voters and overwhelming majority of those voters would refuse to publicly admit they voted for him? Well, maybe…
Ross Perot ran as an Independent.
He was a real factor in the 1992 Presidential election.
He received 19% of the popular vote to Clinton’s 43%, which is huge considering that Perot temporarily dropped out of the race because of threats to himself and family by fanatic GH Bush supporters..
Could he have won if he didn’t stop campaigning in the middle of the battle?
I don’t know but Americans were fed up with the Dems and Rep politicians and the impending NAFTA treaty.
Which, by the way, did not deliver the promised benefits for America, Mexico or Canada.
But it probably did pave the way for China to become a member of the WTO and “Most Favored Nation” Trade Status not many years later.
Despite China’s horrendous human rights violations.
Perot was right on in his views on the trade deals that hollowed out America’s working middle class and that large portion of the population knew it. And more sensed it..
I believe a well-funded candidate like Perot could very well win in today’s world.
Ross Perot and his more intellectual sidekick, Pat Buchanan, were most definitely right about much more than the neocons wrt Iraq or neoliberals wrt the great hollowing out of America.
Did you miss the point where they actually recounted the votes?
What did Trump have behind him when he came down the escalator in 2016? Goldman Sachs supported JEB. The Republican establishment was against Trump, as well.
Rumour: a Gulfstream from the US landed in Romania to order the election correction..
Samatha Power more likely than not. She is always around when these Eastern European “Color Revolutions” go down. She is Victoria Nuland and Obama/Biden’s errand “boy” under cover of the State Dept.
Looks like Romania is being run by a bunch of leftist crooks.
“There is an easy deal to be had…”
Should be easy. But let’s see if the dimowits go for it or show their true colors again.
Mish, if the material isn’t click worthy…
Janet Yellen: “I am concerned about fiscal sustainability and I am sorry we haven’t made more progress. I believe the deficit needs to be brought down”
US debt rose by $8.2 trillion while Yellen was Fed Chair or Vice Chair, and by $8.5 trillion while she was Treasury Secretary
Thanks for writing about this.
In the West, an election is only democratic if the fifth column wins.
There was a reason why for the first 150 years of so of the U.S. democratic experiment that Senators were not directly elected and the Presidential candidates were not a direct product of a public vote. Democracy, at least the type of democracy defined by the U.S. experiment, requires an adherence to certain ideals and norms. If a person gains power, even if through the people, who purposely steers the nation away from the core ideals and norms, the U.S. democratic experiment itself is put at risk. That U.S. democratic experiment, by design, has spread across the global and its result is the liberal democratic governments that we find in most of Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. So, this U.S. democratic experiment has been very successful, but is always a work in process, however the freedoms that liberal democracies provide citizens make such democracies susceptible to being “hacked” by skilled persons whose intent is to undermine the progress of the experiment itself.
Per the Constitution, the U.S. was a republic, not a democracy. The Bill of Rights overrides democracy. The majority of congress cannot simply pass a bill denying freedom of the press. The House, representing the people, was chosen by legal voters and the Senate represented the states, which chose the Senators. The federal government was limited in its powers.
Experiment in democracy is nothing more than a self serving political narrative.
Well the left has moved far to the left outside our traditional values so I assume you are referencing the forces that support their plank of open borders, import the entire 3rd world and prioritize them over American citizens with affirmative action/DEI and free housing/welfare etc…
What would you be saying about making the African former slaves citizens and voter if you were alive in 1870? What would you be saying about granting women the right to vote if you were alive in 1910? What would you be saying if you were alive in the 1920’s when we had a flood of Irish and Italian immigrants coming in? I think that I know what you would be saying about these “non-Americans women who our founders had not seen as equal or worthy of having a voice in politics.
Corrected paragraph from below as I cannot edit typos that I found:
What would you be saying about making the African former slaves citizens and voters if you were alive in 1870? What would you be saying about granting women the right to vote if you were alive in 1910? What would you be saying if you were alive in the 1920’s when we had a flood of Irish and Italian immigrants coming in? I think that I know what you would be saying about these “non-Americans” taking “American” jobs or women who our founders had not seen as equal or worthy of having a voice in politics.
It couldn’t be that the citizenry voted the way they did for their own personal reasons and concerns.
NO! It must be because they were TRICKED BY THE RUSSIANS!!!!!
Now where have I heard that before?
Russian ‘analysts’ openly discussed interference in East European elections as far back as 2000. On Russian state-owned TV. Russian interference is nothing new.
And the West interfered by ASSASSINS.
Again I will default to my fellow MENSA members on here to figure this out 2016: In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA (Are CIA-backed Syrian Rebels Really Fighting Pentagon-backed Syrian Rebels?)
Easy. Keep your friends close and keep your enemies even closer. Basic stuff here.
Russia trapped in the Ukraine. Hezbollah and Hamas leadership liquidated. Syria departing from Russian control. Ruble approaching all time lows vs USD. Also, basic stuff. It’s not hard to see who is making the mistakes.
The only thing that we need to balance is the fact that the cost of spreading misinformation has approached zero. That will come shortly, and hopefully it will be well balanced. Tricky one to do, but it is obvious that it is necessary at this point.
It’s all over but for Putin to go out a window. . . Or kill us all.
Speaking of misinformation……..
And Russian bots. . .
Speaking of mass formation…
Romania needs a Luigi Mangione.
This was all the EU and NATO. A lone wolf isn’t going to change that.
US and EU did not like the outcome so CIA was tasked with getting the fair democratic election annulled using Russia misinformation accusation . The next election likely will not be a free and fair one, especially after the agencies leak information of all sorts on the guy who won including money laundering under age sex charges and whatever else they can dream up.
Proof?
Hunter pardon back to 2014
Russiagate didn’t need any proof…
It was rhetorical. You clowns never have any proof, just whataboutisms.
Georgescu is smart enough not to use Fakebook, which some politicians across the spectrum use as if it was a locked secret chat room, rather than a CIA information gathering tool.
Got it … I’ll update my Google Docs file doing a search/replace for Pete Hegseth / Matt Gaetz with Calin Georgescu. and…Post!
“We will continue to beat you until your morale improves”
In some fashion the CIA or MI6 was involved on behalf of the EU or NATO who could not allow Romania to join Hungary and Slovakia in opposition to the US and NATO war on Russia through Ukraine.
Yay Democracy! Cough cough cough
NWO doesn’t like when elections don’t go their way. You can’t make it up. The Soros crowd at work.
The Soros crowd + the alumni of the Erasmus breeding program. That’s basically the EU elites.
Erasmus program: subsidized higher education in other EU country’s institution. The EU some time ago celebrated the one millionth Erasmus baby, which gives you a good idea what it is about.