In Sunday’s Austrian presidential election there were several discrepancies in voting leading some to question the incredibly tight result.
The election victory of Alexander Van der Bellen, former head of the Austrian Green party, against Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) candidate Norbert Hofer, saw one of the tightest results in Austrian electoral history.
The former Green leader won the vote by a mere 0.6 per cent after postal ballots had been counted. Some are sceptical of the results and one case in particular has given pause.
The town of Waidhofen an der Ybbs has, on the Austrian Interior Ministry website, a stunning result: 146.9 per cent of the town voted, Stern reports.
According to the Interior Ministry website a total of 13,262 people had voted with 12,559 of the votes cast being regarded as valid which is still estimated to be more people than actually reside in the town.
The Interior Ministry came out and claimed that the entire result was simply a technical glitch and Robert Stein, chairman of the Electoral Department of the Interior, said the problem was an input error on behalf of one of their staff.
Mr. Stein said that the result will be changed to fit the actual physical vote, and it is not expected to change the overall outcome of the presidential race.
On social media platforms supporters of FPÖ candidate Mr. Hofer called into question the vote, speculating manipulation by the Interior Ministry. The allegations met no acknowledgement from Mr. Hofer himself who declared his candidacy to be over on Monday via Facebook.
The ministry has yet to rectify the change on their website and say they will likely not change the result until next week when they have conducted a meeting with the election authority of Austria to account for any discrepancies and to ensure that the final result is as accurate as possible.
Immediately following the election, many have been critical of Mr. Van der Bellen for his positions on further integration into a European Union superstate and his call for a lifting of the upper limit on migrants coming into Austria.
It was revealed that while leader of the Austrian Green party he presided over an anti-patriotic poster campaign that tried to “make fun” of the FPÖ by saying “whoever loves Austria is shit.”
Breitbart London’s James Delingpole took the new president to task saying that he was the “extremist president” that Austria “didn’t deserve.”
Mr. Delingpole mentioned the alarming statistic from Waidhofen an der Ybbs saying:
“This stinks of a stitch up by the bien-pensant elite in unholy alliance with the immigrant bloc vote,” and “for the increasingly frustrated native Europeans who have to put up with this, it may be a sign that democracy has failed them.”