[ropejumper]

Paper ballots, and a recount was already issued. There were differences between the two counts but they were minor enough; the recount was actually done because some other guy didn't like the fact that 2nd and 3rd place were only 2000 votes apart.

The breaches apparently didn't do much, the big reason why they cancelled the election was because the leading candidate declared 0 spending for his campaign, but it was proven he used russian money to fund countless tiktok videos that got him popular overnight. This is illegal under romanian law.

Personally, I don't think they should've been cancelled. It's a dubious thing to do under a democracy, and the runner-up was pretty decent anyway and had a chance for the second tour. I guess we'll see how it goes.

[tremon]

If people can only cast one vote, and you take the candidate with the most votes out of circulation (for whatever reason, campaign fraud in this case it seems), then you are discarding the votes of a large contingent of voters. Doing this and letting the results stand is wrong for the same reason why simply distributing the votes pro-rata among the other candidates is wrong: it is more likely that the candidate pulled votes from closely-aligned candidates than candidates on opposing ends of the political spectrum, so you get a skewed representation of the voting distribution.

Whichever method you choose to redistribute (or ignore) the votes cast for that one candidate doesn't matter: you will always end up in election-doctoring territory, even if you do everything by the book and in the open.

Other systems, like ranked-choice voting, might not need a do-over because relative preferences are already expressed on the ballot. But in this case, canceling the entire vote and re-doing it is the only sensible solution.

[ropejumper]

You have a point. It's a complicated issue for sure, I definitely don't want to be the one tasked with making a decision (and being judged for it!)