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Charges Related to Forgery of Signatures for Polish Labour Party
Akai47, Wto, 2010-06-29 08:16 EnglishActivists of the Polish Labour Party are being charged with forging signatures to register candidates in last year's elections to the European Parliament.
"Police from Katowice have finished their investigation in this matter and the case has been sent to the court. On the registration lists you had duplicate signatures, often the ID numbers did not match the gender of the person who signed and there were also dead people on the lists" writes one of the main news services, Wirtualna Polska.
A former member of the Labour Party (PPP) already revealed on the internet how signatures are gathered:
"There are lists from all the previous elections in the office. There are also lists with signatures for a referendum about the anti-missile shield in Poland which were never submitted to the Sejm. In accordance with the Act on Personal Data Protection, these lists should be destroyed. But why should they? They are an invaluable source of address and ID numbers.
When the next elections come, they go to the cabinets and get the old lists. I have done this myself. people sit in the offices and rewrite these lists. They are even given different pens to do it with. As a rule, one person only fills in some lines, not in a row, and then the list is handed on to others, so that there is less chance that similar handwriting will be noticed. So that at first glance the list looks real."
It should be noted that a couple of years ago, people from the Anarchist Federation, The Campaign Against Militarism and ZSP had started collecting signatures to force a referendum about the missile shielf. A few other local organizations started to gather signatures on the same petition. However, then the PPP decided to start their own petition, which differed from the first and thus could not be joined with it. This was a significant diversion to the campaign since many people signed the PPP's petition, thus did not sign the other. In the end, the signatures never even were submitted, but only serve as a data farm for electoral fraud.
The media informs that a few hundred witnesses were heard and 42 counts of forgery have been found.
This year, the PPP also took part in elections to the Senate from the Katowice region and presidential elections. The Public Prosecutor's Office and police are already investigating signatures from the first elections and will probably investigate the ones collected for the presidential elections.
The PPP in May proudly announced that it had collected an astounding 170,000 signatures supporting Boguslaw Zietek for President and had delivered them to the electoral commission. However, the candidate received only 29,000 votes in the elections. (By comparison, the infamous libertarian capitalist clown Korwin-Mikke, one of the candidates usually well at the bottom in results, received almost 417,000 votes!)
PPP is already quite well known for using scummy tactics in its electoral campaign. One of its most infamous tricks was two years ago during the parliamentary elections where in most cities across Poland, the party recruited candidates who had indentical names to famous politicians in the same cities. Therefore, on the lists you had people with the same names, which confused a lot of voters, many of whom accidentally voted for unknown people from PPP.
Despite all this, despite the parties connections with the right wing and despite the fact that Zietek has been found guilty of violating workers' rights, the PPP is supported by some authoritarian left parties and this claims to be supported by the likes of Ken Loach and Noam Chomsky. Chomsky claims he has no recollection of supporting Zietek for president. Given PPP's track record, one has to wonder how much of Zietek's claimed support is also real.
Polish media reports of the story of the charges:
http://wiadomosci.wp.pl/kat,1342,title,10-osob-oskarzonych%3B-podrabiali...
Nasze Miasto
http://katowice.naszemiasto.pl/artykul/470954,falszowali-podpisy-by-znal...
Dziennik Zachodni
http://www.dziennikzachodni.pl/aktualnosci/274905,falszowali-podpisy-pop...
RMF 24
http://www.rmf24.pl/fakty/polska/news-falszowali-podpisy-by-znalezc-sie-...
Wirtualny Nowy Przemysł
http://www.wnp.pl/wiadomosci-agencyjne/pap/slaskie-falszowali-podpisy-by...
