Supreme Court won't hear Cuba-registered voter's bid to annul Saeima election results
A Latvian citizen registered in Cuba asked the Supreme Court to annul the 15th Saeima election results, saying he could not vote by mail. The court rejected part of the application and referred the rest to the Administrative District Court.
Latvia's Supreme Court (AT) has announced the outcome of a case in which a Latvian citizen registered as a resident of Cuba tried to have the results of the 15th Saeima election annulled. The parliamentary election took place on 3 October. The applicant claimed he had not been given the opportunity to vote by mail.
In his application, he asked the court to recognise that the Central Election Commission (CVK) had violated his electoral rights through its actual conduct, by not providing him with postal voting. He also asked for the decision confirming the election results to be overturned.
The court's ruling
A Supreme Court justice concluded that an individual voter has no right to challenge a decision confirming election results. The legislator gave that right only to candidates and to those who submit candidate lists. In addition, no such decision had yet been made when the application was being reviewed. For this part, the court refused to accept the application.
The part concerning the CVK's allegedly unlawful conduct falls under the general procedure for appealing CVK decisions to the Administrative District Court. The special appeal procedure for decisions linked to the conduct of Saeima elections does not apply to such an application. This part of the case was therefore transferred to the Administrative District Court.
The applicant was exempted from paying the state fee. The reasons were the circumstances he cited: his declared residence and workplace in Cuba, where low pay and restrictions on transactions with the country make international payments difficult.
How postal voting worked
Voters could apply for postal voting in the 15th Saeima election on the "Latvija.gov.lv" portal or on the "e.cvk.lv" website. When registering, a voter had to choose one of 37 postal voting stations abroad to which the completed ballot would be delivered. The ballot could also be sent to the CVK's address in Riga, but it had to be posted from abroad.
The Latvian postal voting commission received 444 postal ballots in total, of which 118 were declared invalid. The CVK said that the invalid ones included 91 postal ballots sent from within Latvia.
