There is a Hungarian settlement where it was not possible to elect a mayor in three consecutive municipal elections. In Győr-Moson-Sopron county Táp, no one applied for the position in 1994 and 2002, and in 1998 the voters could not decide, and the two mayoral candidates were tied. In the end, none of them became mayor, because a third party won the by-election due to a tie.
The official campaign period of this year’s local government election, combined with the EP election, began on April 20 with the collection of signatures, candidates and nominating organizations can collect recommendations for more than two weeks, until May 6. In the past, this was not successful everywhere, in the last eight municipal elections, there were always settlements where they could not announce the results of the mayoral elections. In most cases, it was because there was no candidate, but until 2010, unsuccessful elections due to equal votes were also a relatively common phenomenon. The latter significantly overestimates the value of voters’ votes: in these places even one extra vote could have decided the election.
The problems started immediately after the first election in 1990. At that time, Balatonheny, Kispáli and Tolmác could not announce the results of the mayoral elections either – why, it is now impossible to find out, the exact results of the first local authority election have not been preserved. After that, the number of settlements increased until 2002, where for some reason they could not announce a winner in the regular election. In 1994, the results were annulled in three places, there was a tie in six places, and in the already mentioned Tápon, not a single candidate for mayor competed.
In Táp, in addition to the by-elections necessary due to the three consecutive unsuccessful mayoral elections, there were also three more by-term mayoral elections, meaning that in addition to the eight ordinary elections so far, six extraordinary ones have already been held in this settlement.
The most unsuccessful mayoral elections were in 2002, when due to the lack of a candidate, the election was canceled in seven municipalities and in 18 municipalities there was a tie between the candidates, for example in Zsámbé: Mrs. Horváth Gellért and Erzsébet Soós Buzás both won 860 votes each in Pest, which has a population of nearly six thousand. county town.
The lack of mayoral candidates is much more typical in smaller settlements, villages and Transdanubia, but it also happened in the last two municipal elections in Balatonszepezd and Lakhegy. Since 2010, there hasn’t been a settlement leader duel ending in a tie, but even in 2019, there were elections in individual constituencies that ended in a tie.
As a result, even one vote can be particularly important in local government elections, because in many cases even this one extra vote can decide the position of mayor or the majority of the board. Thus, in this case, the depressing saying that “my vote doesn’t matter anyway” is not valid.
In Hungary, we elect mayors to lead 3,177 settlements in local elections. In addition, the figures presented above are truly dwarfed, yet it cannot be denied that every time there were at least a couple of villages where the voting proved ineffective for one reason or another.
