Elections 2023. What happens to votes from abroad? Reports include, among other things, problems with protocols

Electoral Commission spokesman Marcin Chmielnicki announced after 9 p.m. that the District Electoral Commission in Warsaw had already received protocols from all foreign electoral commissions.

Earlier, there were alarming signals about many cases of non-approval of protocols from foreign commissions.

KO MP Robert Tyszkiewicz, chairman of the parliamentary committee for communication with Poles abroad, said on TVN24 BiS before 5 p.m. that he had received information from the committee in Malmö, Sweden, where its members have been waiting for over ten hours for the approval of the protocol by the National Electoral Commission.

– Literally half an hour ago I talked to Malmö, where the commission members have been waiting for over ten hours for the approval of the protocol by the National Electoral Commission. They sleep in cars outside the premises, because many of them are not from Malmö but came there to work for the committee. This is an absolutely scandalous case and there are more such cases, he said.

We also received similar information on Kontakt 24.

Mrs. Urszula, who works at the electoral commission in Karlsruhe, Germany, also wrote to Kontakt 24. The woman reported difficulty in contacting the National Electoral Commission and the German consulate, which keep returning the reports to them with “marginal” comments, such as the lack of a comma, a period or a hyphen.

Radio ZET journalist Mariusz Gierszewski also raised alarm about the situation in Karlsruhe. He wrote that members of the local committee “are fighting with the consulate to accept the protocols.” “These are sent back with technical comments. They are afraid that about 4,000 votes will be wasted!” – noted the journalist.

A member of the commission from Berlin also called Kontakt 24. – We received information from the embassy that the servers were blocked and our votes would not count. The IT specialist we employ claims that this is a scam, because to block the server, it takes 150 million messages at once, as they are small files. If the commission does not take this into account, 2,000 votes will be invalidated. I’m upset because we sent all the data at 7 am. Currently, we don’t know what to expect, he commented.

The American correspondent of RMF FM, Paweł Żuchowski, wrote about problems at the commission in the Norwegian district of Stabekk, near Oslo. “On my feet for over 36 hours. No food (only snacks) and no sleep under normal conditions,” he described. “Warsaw received the voting results to the Sejm. But it did not approve the results for the Senate and referendum. Committee members cannot go home and finish their work,” he added.

Krzysztof Lisek, former MP and MEP of the Civic Platform, in 2007-2011 chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, after 5 p.m. informed about the problems of the committee in The Hague, which – as he wrote – sent the election reports at 5 p.m., but there is no confirmation from NEC. “People are after almost 40 hours of non-stop work. The same is true for commissions in Belgium, Spain, Sweden, etc. There are cases of fainting. Failure or sabotage? 4 hours left,” he wrote then.

Meanwhile, the British correspondent of “Fakty” TVN, Maciej Woroch, reported around 5:30 p.m. that in many commissions in the United Kingdom, their members “were sitting and waiting.” – Even though they worked all day yesterday, even though they sent the protocols to Warsaw a few hours ago, without a green checkmark next to their protocol, sent from the electoral commission in Warsaw, the work of the commission cannot be closed and dissolved, and therefore we must sit and wait to see if there will be any corrections (from the National Electoral Commission), he reported then.

Due to these signals, questions about the approval of committee minutes from abroad were asked during the NEC conference at 6:30 p.m.

The head of the National Electoral Commission, Sylwester Marciniak, explained at that time that the situation concerned district no. 19, i.e. district electoral commission no. 1 in Warsaw. – It should be noted, first of all, that this district commission covers a record number of district electoral commissions, almost 1.3 thousand. Of this, in fact, it also covers abroad – that is, 420 district commissions – he noted.

He explained that it is a matter of, on the one hand, the organization of the work of the district electoral commission, and, on the other hand, the issue of the flow of protocols from district electoral commissions, both from abroad and from the capital city of Warsaw. He emphasized that this “certainly made it difficult to check the protocols on an ongoing basis.”

– In fact, these sending and confirmation times are not correct, because it takes too long. We intervened. I personally talked to the chairman of the district electoral commission. It has sped up a bit and I hope that most of these protocols will be adopted, he explained then.

The head of the National Electoral Office, Magdalena Pietrzak, explained before 7 p.m. that “there was an accumulation of work,” but now “it has already been cleared.”