Modern societies have problems with social cohesion. Austria’s problem is with adhesion. The envelopes for the postal ballots in the presidential revote scheduled for October don’t stick, the interior ministry announced this week. He hinted that he might have to postpone the election. Some allege the crisis has been manufactured to keep country’s hard-right, anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPÖ) out of power. Some worry it will bring them to power.
In May’s elections for the largely ceremonial post of president, Austrians kicked out the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and Christian Democrats (ÖVP), who had divvied up the country for most of the last two generations. The run-off pitted Alexander van der Bellen (a rare smoker in the Green Party), who was supposed to win in a cakewalk against the right-winger Norbert Hofer. In the end Van Der Bellen just squeaked it out. In fact, without the postal votes counted at the end, Hofer would have won.
Hofer contested the election before the supreme court. He said the interior minister had announced the results prematurely and that the postal votes had been counted in a highly irregular fashion. On July 1, the supreme court said he was right, eventually setting the revote for October 2.
This was not exactly a ringing endorsement of European democracy. It may have led supporters of the populist Silvio Berlusconi to wonder whether they, too, hadn’t been ripped off in Italy’s 2013 parliamentary election. (They lost by a mere 4 tenths of a percentage point—29.5 percent to 29.1 percent— but got barely a third of the seats, 345 to 125.) It called to mind the contested 2000 U.S. elections between George W. Bush and Al Gore, when the latter campaign tried to disqualify Bush-leaning absentee ballots from the military.
Hofer seemed to gain momentum in the aftermath. And now the interior ministry is signaling that it is in no hurry to redo this election at all. Hofer, naturally, is looking for an alternative to a fourth-inning rainout of a game he seems to be winning, and on Friday he found one. Given the system’s potential for gaming and abuse, he suggested, elections would be fairer if we abolished mail voting altogether. Whatever one may think of his other policies, in this one he is almost certainly right.
