Following the revelations of vote-rigging in its internal elections the Estonian Reform Party has conducted thorough checks of the votes cast in the party polls, chairman of Reform and prime minister of Estonia Andrus Ansip said on Friday.
Votes given in Reform Party polls 'thoroughly checked' - Estonian PM
7th June 2013, 19:17
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"Not many more can come out," Ansip said of the prospect that more votes cast using stolen identity could be uncovered. He said 39 fraudulently cast votes had been confirmed.
After the scandal broke, the party subjected suspect votes given in internal polls to an in-depth scrutiny, Ansip told reporters after a meeting of the president and leaders of Estonia's political parties in the president's office. The party checked the log files and performed an all-out check of votes cast by members aged 55 and older. For that phone calls were made to one in five such voters to ascertain that the vote had not been cast without the person being involved.
"The Reform Part responded quickly and in an adequate manner," Ansip said. "All cases of fraud will be exposed. There is no place for fraudsters in the Reform Party," he added.
When asked why the Reform Party was using a system in internal elections whose security level was not of the same class as security in national elections, Ansip said that no party was able to create and maintain a system as expensive as that of national e-voting. Besides, trust has to have a place in political parties, he said.
President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who summoned the leaders of Estonia's parliamentary parties to his Kadriorg office Friday in the wake of the scandal related to e-vote rigging in Reform Party's internal elections, said that the latest scandal went beyond the limits of tolerable.
Describing the scandal as yet another fraud scandal in the Reform Party, Ilves said that "it clearly surpassed all limits of what's tolerable," at the same time adding that what happened in the Reform Party should not be mixed up with e-elections on the level of the state.
"Let me emphasize, internal elections in one political party and Estonian e-elections are two totally different things both substantively and technically. That difference has to be made," Ilves said.
The president summoned chairs of parliamentary parties to his office to discuss the domestic policy situation in Estonia.
"The situation is extremely worrying and this is a question of the credibility of Estonia's party democracy," the president said on Facebook issuing the call on Tuesday amid a scandal of voting fraud in internal leadership elections of the Reform Party in the course of which the leader of the party, Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, and MEP Kristiina Ojuland, member of the governing board, accused one another of lying. On Wednesday the board of the senior ruling coalition member expelled Ojuland from the party's ranks.