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:

I’ve given up on chasing after the riots like I used to (texts, photos), but the national holidays and commemorations which they unvariably adorn here in Hungary still have an eerie quality. Living downtown, you have the sound of the choppers hovering overhead all day and night long — and when you venture out in the evening, the boulevard is cordoned off and a convoy of cop cars and vans filled with riot police sirens past.

A quick glance at the usual breathless minute-by-minute reporting by the right-wing Magyar Nemzet newspaper suggests that an overpowering police presence this time stifled the would-be rioters – a generation yearning to emulate the heroic fights of its grandparents, doomed to imitate them as farce. At what cost they are succeeding is another question.

Update: Police did find “three petrol-fuelled explosive devices with timers attached” in the boot of a passenger car by Budapest’s Western Railway Station.

On the other hand, there was a rare occasion of, let’s say, civic intervention:

A group of 200, most of whom were wearing ski masks covering their faces, moved on to join a World Federation of Hungarians gathering in another part of the city when residents of a nearby building doused them with an unidentified liquid probably water. They responded by throwing rocks at the offending apartments.

That’s a first, I think.

The Hungarian TÁRKI Social Research Institute conducts an annual survey on xenophobia. As part of the survey, the sociologists ask respondents whether they would accept or refuse refugees from a list of specific ethnic backgrounds. Standard fare, so far.

Except as control group, they slip in a fictional group: the Pirezians.

Hungarian press agency MTI reports that once again, Hungarians blithely dismissed entry for these obviously no-good Pirezian refugees:

"Somewhere there is Piresia", the editors of Uncylopedia helpfully note

Sociologists divide Hungarians into three groups – 25-33 percent who would hermetically seal the country’s borders to all foreigners, 10 percent who would accept everyone with open arms, and the middle group of about 58 percent, who would pick and choose whom to accept, wrote [..] Nepszabadsag, citing a recent survey.

Sociologist Endre Sik pointed out that a key point in the survey [..] concerns the “Pirezians,” a non-existent ethnic group included in the survey as a reality-check. The two extremes on the scale for the pick-and-choose group are Arabs (rejected by 83 percent) and Russians (rejected by 76 percent) on the one side and ethnic Hungarians from neighbouring countries (rejected by 7 percent) on the other. The Pirezians were rejected by 66 percent of the mid-group, down slightly from last year’s 68 percent rejection figure, and up a bit from 59 percent in 2006.

The TARKI data reveal (Hungarian) that the middle, “pick-and-choose” group itself shrunk, while the xenophobic group that would hermetically seal the country’s borders to all foreigners grew in the past two years from 24% to 32%. So the group that would dismiss all foreigners, including those poor Pirezians, grew — and in addition, a larger part of the middle group looked askance at them as well. All in all, then, 70% of Hungarians want none of them Pirezians (Piresians?), against 65% two years ago.

Then again, other foreign peoples should be so lucky… It’s not just the Arabs and Russians that are even more undesired.