This Thursday, October 30th, the Constitutional Court (TC) refused the appeal presented on Monday by Chega regarding the ruling that determined the recount of votes in a section of the parish of São Domingos de Benfica, in Lisbon, in the municipal elections that took place on October 12th.
The TC judges, meeting in plenary, considered the appeal “legally inadmissible”, adding that for this reason “it was decided not to take cognizance of it”.
Last Friday, following an appeal from the CDU, the TC ordered the “recount of votes from polling station no. 28 of the polling station in the parish of São Domingos de Benfica” and also decided to validate a vote in favor of the CDU that had been considered null in a polling station in the parish of Santa Maria Maior, having also declared null another vote attributed to Chega.
Following this decision by the TC, the party led by André Ventura filed an appeal for not agreeing with the ruling, in particular with regard to the validation of a null vote in favor of the CDU, having in this regard considered that it was “complementarily wrong” and revealed “a certain partiality” of that court.
According to the TC judges, Chega bases its appeal on the “contradiction of rulings of the learned court” and the violation of the electoral law of local authority bodies, stressing that the decision to validate a null vote for the CDU “violates decisions and principles previously established by the Constitutional Court itself”, and therefore underlined that the appeal aimed at “the standardization of jurisprudence which, if not accepted, would be rooted in unconstitutionality, because it would violate the law to effective judicial protection since the application of the law would not be uniform”.
Chega then alleged a difference in interpretation of the law taking into account what was followed in previous TC decisions on different cases. Therefore, he asked for “the decision contained in the minutes of the general tabulation meeting to be annulled and reinstituted”.
The Constitutional Court decided on Monday to notify representatives of the parties, coalitions and groups of citizens involved in the election “to, if they wish, respond to the appeal filed by the Chega party within a period of one day”. Only the CDU responded, declaring itself to be “rejecting the appeal, due to legal inadmissibility, and, alternatively, its being unfounded”.
In this Thursday’s TC ruling, the judges at Palácio Ratton decided that the extraordinary appeal for standardization of jurisprudence, which constitutes “a way of triggering a ruling by all judges in the full section when a section distances itself from what was previously decided”, is a “manifestly unfounded” claim.
It should be remembered that in the elections for the Lisbon City Council, Chega started out ahead of the CDU by a difference of 11 votes, according to the provisional results, but days later the local tabulation assembly indicated that the difference had been reduced to three votes. However, following the ruling of the Constitutional Court, Chega’s advantage over the CDU was reduced to just one vote.
The issue is of great importance because this difference between Chega and CDU is relevant regarding the election of councilors in the Lisbon City Council, with whoever is ahead winning two mandates, while the other only gets one.
The post Constitutional Court rejects Chega’s appeal regarding vote recount in a Lisbon parish appeared first on Veritas News.
