INVESTIGATION

Elections

Unhack Democracy’s year-long investigation into the April 2018 Hungarian Parliamentary elections indicates Prime Minister Viktor Orbán secured his one-seat supermajority thanks to a combination of outright fraud, gerrymandering and by engineering the electoral system.

Investigations by Unhack Democracy based on quantitative and qualitative research drawn from testimonies from over 1,000 Polling Station Commission (PSC) members conducted over four consecutive elections in Hungary (2018 parliamentary, 2019 European Parliament and municipal, 2020 by-election), identify clearly persistent and concerning trends of voter fraud and irregularities on election day in Hungary.

These include: intimidating Polling Station Commission (PSC) members and voters by the ruling party and local government officials, threatening elderly voters in care-homes, questions around the credibility of protocols, suspicious ‘ticket-splitting’ rates in precincts where there were no opposition delegates, missing absentee ballots, and a mysterious failure of national election software. There is also widespread evidence of forged electoral registers through the illegal transportation of phantom voters from Ukraine, Serbia and Romania, which in 2021 in the run up to the election was made legal by Fidesz. These form part of a wider trend of electoral manipulation that include large scale electoral clientelism, the specific and widespread targeting of Roma, and concerns around the registering, collecting and posting of ballots for diaspora voters by an extensive network of ethnic ‘agent’ groups who receive Hungarian public money.

Unhack Democracy’s investigations have been covered in 18 countries and 6 languages around the world, including on France24, BBC World and AFP.

Read our report into voting irregularities and fraud at the 2018 Hungarian elections. →

Over 1000 polling station commission members’ testimonies:

2018 parliamentary elections: Testimonies from 170 polling station officials
2019 EP & local elections: Testimonies from 850 polling station officials
2020 Borsod by-election: Testimonies from 48 polling station officials