spyraal
Jedi Master
alkhemst said:
Greece has had quite a turbulent history for the past 60 years following WW2, including a bloody civil war (1945-1949) and a military junta (1967-1974) among others, events that had a great and also widely known to Greeks involvement of USA. The result of these events was some major mistrust building in the Greek people for potential foreign involvement in their politics. So, in 1981 elections, socialist Andreas Papandreou won a landslide victory and became Prime Minister tapping on the strong anti-EU and anti-NATO sentiment of the people at the time. Wanting to cure this chronic mistrust of Greek people, he introduced a very rigorous and hard to rig voting system in Greece. Ever since, every single voting center in any election has at least one judicial representative, two randomly selected lawyers, and at least one representative from all political parties involved in the elections. Together they supervise all parts of the voting procedure, and at the end, the votes of an election center are counted in the open under the presence of all these people. The results are then announced by this commission by phone to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where they are received by a similar yet even more numerous commission. So at any point of the voting process, there are people watching each other. This made any kind of (especially low-level) vote rigging near impossible under so many watchful eyes.
But for some 15 years now, computers have been introduced in the final counting procedure, collecting in a database the results from all over the country. This has since become an obvious "weak link". To make things worst, a private informatics company was given this task. A company called Singular Logic. At first this was just another small company with the technical know-how. But this company was soon bought by "Marfin Investment Group", a group run by a corrupt Greek oligarch called Vgenopoulos. Rumor has it that just before the Greek elections of 2012 (when SYRIZA was first feared of having a chance to win the elections) was sold to the US investment corp "Kohlberg Kravis Roberts". Kravis himself is rumored to be a high profile economic hitman and closely connected to Goldman Sachs. Still, under Greek law, that state has the right to have really close supervision of the company during election with government people monitoring everything up close. So one could say that it's up to any Greek government to exercise this supervision and control or not. My guess is the SYRIZA (being in the government now) took the necessary steps and exercised the government's right to have people supervising the part of the referendum's vote counting process that involves Singular Logic.
So the Greek elections system has come to have a "window" for rigging, but my guess is that it's only with each government's consent that this can be put to work effectively. Probably they never really thought a non-puppet party like SYRIZA could ever come to be in the government to begin with. But how SYRIZA came to power in the first place once could ask. I should note here that in Greek elections we still use only real paper ballots which are safely stored and kept for at least a year after any election, in case there has to be a recount on the suspicion of fraud. Under Greek law, a recount can happen if at least 1/3 of all MPs consider it necessary (that is 100 MPs out of 300), and an official recount is meant to be much more rigorous and elaborate that the first counting. So a too obvious rigging could invoke this process that could really blow off the facade and control system they built. This rigging can "fix" the elections when they need some extra 3-5% of votes to put their own people to power, but used more extensively to bridge differences of 10% or more in votes involves a great risk of having a smoking gun too. SYRIZA won with an 11% head in January 2015. People have their own overall sense of how popular each party really is, and there is a limit to how much rigging they can do in a plausible manner. A possible recount could expose them really bad. Rigging the results against SYRIZA in January's election may have been considered too risky.
I hope this information sheds some light on the Greek elections system, and might explain some questions on the referendum and how SYRIZA was allowed to be in the government in the first place. Thank you all.
:)
