On Wednesday already, Adam Bodnar submitted a letter to the Supreme Court - demanding an inspection of ballot papers in 1,472 district electoral commissions which were pointed out in an independent analysis by Krzysztof Kontek, EngD - a statistical anomalies' researcher formerly associated with the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH).
However, on Friday the National Prosecutor's Office received the expert opinions in the same matter that it ordered, prepared by valued scientists currently associated with SGH - Jacek Haman, PhD and Andrzej Torój, PhD. Their conclusions differ from the ones presented by Krzysztof Kontek.
Jacek Haman's analysis mentions 145 committees "with a very high risk of error", 104 "high risk" and 47 "with possible anomalies". Summed up - this gives 296 committees to investigate. Meanwhile, Andrzej Torój wrote that "with the assumptions extremely favorable for the candidate who received the lower number of votes" - 18,500 votes might have been unlawfully "deducted" from Rafał Trzaskowski's account.
This means that none of the expert opinions ordered provides "a scenario that can be considered as changing the election result on a national scale".
According to officially published runoff results - right wing representing Karol Nawrocki, backed by formerly-ruling-now-opposition Law and Justice conservative party, won a total of 10,606,628 votes (50.89%). Meanwhile, his centrist rival - Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, backed by formerly-opposition-now-ruling Civic Coalition, garnered 10,237,177 votes (49.11%).
However, numerous reports of pro-Nawrocki results-meddling started to appear soon after the vote, and the initial test probe indeed showed dubious discrepancies of the kind in 11 out of 13 commissions checked. Due to that fact, more than 50.000 electoral protests were filed to the Supreme Court, demanding a full-scale probe and an overall recount. The institution staffed during the conservatives rule discarded more than 40.000 of them, though - citing 'formal errors' as the reason.
The Prosecutor General's spokesperson, Prosecutor Anna Adamiak, explained that the ballot papers may be inspected based on the Code of Criminal Procedure. However, in order to assess irregularities from a legal and criminal perspective, an investigation must be initiated. And this is only possible when there is a suspicion of a crime being committed.
The Prosecutor General's intention to establish an investigative team therefore means that the investigation of the kind either has already been initiated, or that it will be initiated on Monday.
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Source: PAP, IAR