Talking with Americans about voting fraud – or more correctly: voter registration fraud – gets you roughly two kinds of answers, depending on whether you talk to a Republican or a Democrat.

Ferencvaros, Budapest (Used under CC license from Flickr user Peiboliche)

It happens on a large scale, is a scandal, and surely indicates that there must be a problem with actual voting fraud as well. Or it’s a hype, stirred up by a losing party eager to avoid facing up to its failure; something that only occurs on a small scale and doesn’t affect the actual election results anyway.

Either way, the subject’s offered much fodder for controversy.

Well, here’s a reality check from Hungary. You thought you may have a problem?

Police probe fake candidate petition slips in Budapest local constituency

More than 2,200 fake candidate petition slips were discovered in Budapest’s ninth district, where parliamentary constituency elections are due to be held on January 11 [..].

Under Hungary’s electoral system, it is necessary to collect 750 slips showing support among the local public before standing a candidate. [..] The forgeries involved the conservative opposition Democratic Forum (MDF), non-parliamentary radical nationalist MIEP and the non-parliamentary radical nationalist Hungarian Social Green Party (MSZZP) [..].

The National Printing Office [..] has examined the slips received and found that 1,152 of those given for the MSZZP candidate had been forged while only 13 were genuine. There were 669 fakes out of 1,015 slips sent in for MDF’s candidate, and 415 fakes out of a total of 781 MIEP slips. [..]

Parties which had qualified to stand a candidate were the Humanist party, the Free Democrats, the Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party and Fidesz-KDNP.

13 out of 1,152 genuine! I mean, wow.

It actually gets a little more byzantine than that. Note these paras:

Mihaly Dezsi, who failed to meet the requirements to stand as MDF’s candidate by Friday’s deadline, said he would file charges against an unknown perpetrator [..].

Dezsi, a former police spokesman, said there is suspicion that someone had gained access to databases and used personal data when filling in fake petition slips. He said the bulk of the slips had been found in the local party office’s mail boxes. They had not been collected door-to-door by party activists.

In short: was the MDF in fact set up by one of the other parties? One competing for the same votes, perhaps, or one viscerally opposed enough to the MDF to want it out of the race? Fill in enough fake slips, dump them into the mailbox of the rival party, and hope it will be gullible enough to depend on them.

To appreciate the full dose of deceit this little story offers, by the way, consider the chutzpah of the far right nationalists who use a splinter party masquerading under the moderate sounding moniker “Social Green”. (A more common practice than you might think, in Eastern Europe but not exclusively there; in the Netherlands the leading far right parties of the 1980s were called Centre Party and Centre Democrats.)

Tamas Polgar

For bonus conspiracy theory points, note that the country’s second largest party, the Hungarian Socialist Party, is not standing in these by-elections, presumably supporting the Free Democratic candidate instead. And that the abbreviation of the Socialists (and as in much of Europe, political parties here are usually referred to by their abbreviation) is MSZP. And that the “Hungarian Social Green Party” abbreviates as MSZZP.

Were they trying to get some stray votes from the MSZP’s pensioner voter base – old folk looking for MSZP on the ballot and not noticing the extra Z? The MSZZP candidate was Tamas Polgar, better known locally as the rabble-rousing blogger Tomcat, so who knows. Kind of like spam sites buying up domain names like googgle-dot-com. The marvels of a multi-party system!