Czech court upholds EU election results challenged by former Czech MEP

2 months ago 14

The Czech Supreme Administrative Court has upheld the country’s European election results, rejecting a complaint by outgoing centre-right MEP Michaela Šojdrová about preferential voting, although it found errors in some election committee records and suggested changes.

On 22 June, outgoing MEP Michaela Šojdrová (KDU-ČSL, EPP) filed a complaint about discrepancies in the counting of preferential votes.

Czechia uses preferential voting, which allows voters to cast a preferential vote within the list of parties of their choice. Candidates who receive a majority of preferences are more likely to be elected, as they skip candidates higher up the list.

“Immediately after the elections, I started to receive feedback from my voters that even though they had circled me, I had no preferential votes in their region,“ said Šojdrová.

According to the published results, Šojdrová received 32,447 preferential votes. This was more than Ondřej Kolář (TOP 09, EPP), who had 31,623 preferential votes and was on the same electoral list as the SPOLU (ECR, EPP) coalition.

However, Šojdrová was placed one place below him and was only 616 preferential votes short of defending her seat in the European Parliament for a second time.

Following her complaint, the Supreme Administrative Court ordered an audit of the votes, and the results did indeed show that almost a hundred votes for Šojdrová had been incorrectly counted for other candidates.

However, this was not enough to secure the seat, and the court therefore confirmed Kolář as the newly elected MEP.

“The Supreme Administrative Court, therefore, found certain irregularities. However, we have concluded that the hypotheses put forward by the appellant have not been confirmed,” said the judge.

“I respect the information presented by the Court, and I consider the results to be final. However, I will not stop my work. I will continue to focus on the issues I have been working on in the EP [European Parliament],” Šojdrová wrote on X.

Šojdrová told Czech television that she would particularly like to continue working on new genomic techniques, as she did during her time as a substitute member of the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee (AGRI).

Responding to the Court’s decision, MEP-elect Kolář said he understood the complaint.

“It was really close between us, and it is actually good that the court has recalculated and removed doubts”, he said.

However, Dostál pointed to the existing irregularities confirmed by the court. The court itself has recommended that the forms used by the electoral commissions should be changed to prevent similar irregularities from recurring.

“Whether we really have such a great election (system) as we keep telling ourselves is a matter for another debate. As long as the election commissions count the votes like bartenders in a pub, we have a problem,” Kolář wrote in X.

(Kateřina Horáková, Charles Szumski | Euractiv.cz)