Everyone is competent in their own lives - civic action for fair elections
Ballot boxes are open from morning till night, we go, vote and wait for the results. But what happens to our votes then? Who counts our votes? What guarantees the transparency of the process? And what determines the result? What information do voters use to make their decisions? What can citizens do to ensure fair elections beyond their vote?
This article takes stock of how civic initiatives are helping along these lines:
informed decision-making
counting votes and ensuring fair elections
local community advocacy
Informed decision-making
One of the basic tenets of modern democracy is that everyone should be seen as competent to make decisions about their own lives. And what else is a vote but a community decision about our own lives? But where we put the power of choice in the hands of the people, the opportunity to be properly informed must be guaranteed too.
To combat the shrinking of public spaces in rural areas, the Nyomtassteis! team runs a weekly newspaper that covers the most important current events in public life. The newspaper is printed in-house with the help of volunteers and distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies.
The ability to get information from credible sources is increasingly hampered by the rapid spread of deliberate disinformation and fake news around the world. In addition to its weekly campaign analyses, Political Capital is running a series of Facebook posts mapping disinformation about Hungary and the European Union.
Transparency in campaign financing is also part of fair elections: Transparency International and K-Monitor help by monitoring public funds, including taxpayers' money spent on campaigns, exposing fake parties and making recommendations against campaign-related corruption.
Counting of the votes
An accurate and credible count of the votes is a guarantee of fair elections. This is the task of the counting commissioners, who are appointed partly by the municipalities and partly by the parties. They are responsible for monitoring the voting process and counting the votes after the polls have closed. Voting commissioners, meanwhile, oversee each other too: The more party or candidate delegates are present in a constituency, the less likely it is that someone will commit an irregularity, either accidentally or deliberately, without being detected.
Anyone can apply to count votes, subject to a few restrictions, and although officially a party or independent candidate will be the delegating body, it is still a basic civic task: to check the fairness of the election. Several CSOs are encouraging this, and anyone who does not want to register through a party can do so under the coordination of Számoljunk együtt! (Count Together). Unhack Democracy also runs an information site and produces e-learning material for voter supervisors.
We can also do a lot for the fairness of elections by being aware of our rights as voters and by reporting any irregularities we see - whether because we are victims or witnesses. In such cases, we can turn to the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union or the Hungarian Helsinki Committee for legal assistance, the former also running a regular legal helpline in the form of the election hotline.
The active citizen
Many civil society organisations offer opportunities to represent our democratic values in other ways besides participating in elections.
First-time voters can sign up for this workshop, courtesy of the Power of Humanity Foundation, which has also created an online game for this age group.
The School of Public Life offers regular election programmes, training and a film club.
The Civic College Foundation and the Ökotárs Foundation help to empower small communities to make their voices heard, so that the will of local people can prevail in local affairs.
The above list is far from complete and is constantly growing. A society can only function properly if its members can function as a real community, plan for the future, make decisions together - and trust each other. And this can only happen if we ourselves are actively part of the community to which we belong.
Cover photo: Fair Vote campaign
