Lithuania’s electoral commissio to consider invalidating election results in Trakai

The draft proposal will be discussed on Sunday, CEC chairman Zenonas Vaigauskas said. “We have set up a panel to evaluate all the information we have and proposed a solution,” he told journalists after the CEC meeting on Friday.

There are grounds to declare the election results in Trakai invalid, he added.

The CEC has also asked the police and prosecutors for information to make the right decision.

The police are now carrying out a pre-trial investigation into vote-buying and other election violations in Trakai.

The CEC itself is investigating whether envelopes with early votes were opened and then re-sealed. There are over 300 hundred such envelopes, and the majority of votes were cast in favor of the Liberal Movement. Some voting papers were damaged.

During the local elections last Sunday in Trakai, the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania received 24.65 percent of votes and secured seven seats on the local council. The Liberal Movement came in second with 24.17 percent of votes and six mandates, followed by the coalition of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania and the Russian Alliance (17.61 percent and five mandates), the Lithuanian Freedom Union (Liberals) (10.53 percent and three mandates), the Homeland Union – Lithuanian Christian Democrats (6.61 percent and two mandates) and the Labor Party (4.77 percent and one mandate).