It was certainly most suspicious how postal votes changed the results, and the loser is challenging the count of the postal votes.
As Stalin said, ‘Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.’
What’s “most suspicious” about the postal votes changing the result? They were 12% of the vote, which is more than enough to swing an election that close.
It’s not suspicious as such that the postal votes are distributed differently between parties that the in-person vote - that’s a generally expected effect because the postal voters are a different demographic from the in-person votes. Here in Germany my obervation is that the postal votes tend more to the left (green/red) than the in-person votes.
Postal voters are often people who expect to travel (for business or pleasure) on the election sunday (these tend to be more educated and vote more to the left), and some very elderly people (who, when they do vote to the right, prefer old-school conservativism to FPÖ style right wing populism)
There is some relatively limited risk in postal votes, but the voting fraud is on the voting end rather on the counting end. These risks are with some caregivers of the very infirm and of people with middling mental disabilities, and with some tyrannical spouses.
The challenge from the blue second runner against the green victor was to be expected, because conspiracy theories of the establishment being against them is the stock in trade of right wing populists like the FPÖ. Their German cousins of the AfD deal in the same conspiracy theories, even announcing a campaign of ‘vote observers’ at the last state elections (a publicity stunt mainly - there do not seem to have been many of them. If they’d been serious they’d have volunteered for the precinct volunteer election official posts beforehand, but that’s a boring day of work; better to sling mud from the outside).
Why would that require a new election? Just count the votes again. Surely they haven’t discarded the actual ballots.
Here in Minnesota, we have recently had a couple of major state-wide elections that had to be recounted, and that worked out fine.
That works if you’re afraid that the ballots were counted incorrectly, but not if you’re afraid that the unauthorized people tampered with the ballots.
Not that I’m saying there are grounds for such concerns.
Seems like altering that many ballots would take a lot of work, and involve too many people too much time to keep it a secret.
Plus, the final margin was 30k, so assuming the “real” vote of the 60k was close to the same 50-50 split as the rest of the voting, they’d have to basically change every ballot that went against them. That would seem to be trivially easy to spot just by looking at the aggregate numbers, without any need for reexamining the ballots at all.
Despite what Stalin said, stealing an election without being caught seems really hard to do.
A short overview of the Austrian political scene
In the red corner: SPÖ (Social Democratic Party of Austria) - centre-left Social Democrats - 26.8% in the 2013 national election
In the black corner: ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party) - centre-right Christian Democrats - 24.0 % in the 2013 national election
In the blue corner: FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria) - right-wing populists - 20.5 % in the 2013 national election
In the green corner: Die Grünen - Greens - 12.4 % in the 2013 national election.
Red and Black have been the incumbents in the national government since 1945 and are tainted in many disaffected voters’ view by gross clientelism. They are in the electoral doghouse at present - their presidential candidates failed to reach the runoff in the presidential elections and they wanted the green candidate to make it in order to save liberal democracy but did not endorse him for fear of giving him the kiss of death.
Blue has ridden to political success in the last few elections by a combination of disaffection with red/black incumbency and skilful use of xenophobia.
And it turns out there were indeed irregularities (details are not stated) and the election will be re-run.
My understanding is that the postal votes were opened and counted on the Sunday, when the rules stipulated that they shouldn’t be before 9am on the Monday, and that the full complement of supervisors wasn’t present when they were opened and counted. The constitutional court decided that the whole election should be re-run to ensure public confidence in the system, not that there had necessarily been any fraud, just that it was important to demonstrate that everything had been done by the book.