On 15 September 2023, the Supreme Court, sitting in the Extraordinary Review and Public Affairs Chamber, dismissed the complaint of the representative of the Election Committee Nowa Lewica (Committee) against the resolution of the National Electoral Commission (PKW) dismissing the appeal against the resolution of the District Electoral Commission (OKW) in Siedlce concerning the refusal to register a candidate for senator of the Committee in electoral district No. 47 in the elections to the Senate of the Republic of Poland, scheduled for 15 October 2023.
The complaint charged, i.a., that in the case of the OKW's doubts as to the legibility or completeness of a particular signature of support, the OKW is obliged to request the voter to provide explanations in this regard, and without such a request it must consider the signature to be correct.
The Supreme Court pointed out that the refusal to register the candidate was solely due to the failure to include a sufficient number of valid signatures of support in the submission (detailed statistics of the defects in the challenged individual signatures were presented in the appendix to the resolution).
The Supreme Court concluded that the PKW duly refused to accept individual signatures of support. Referring to the charges of the complaint, the Supreme Court emphasised that the explanations of voters, provided for in Article 217(1) of the Electoral Code, the lack of which is charged, may only concern confirmation in special cases, whether a particular voter gave his or her support (e.g. in the case of a suspicion of forgery of the signature of that voter, i.e. entering data of a person without his or her knowledge), and not supplementation by the district electoral commissions of incorrectly listed data. The same rules apply to all election committees participating in the elections. Therefore, the charges in this regard are groundless.
The Supreme Court emphasised that the PKW, with regard to the filed appeal, verified once again all the signatures of support challenged by the OKW in the Central Registry of Voters and, following their re-verification, recognised 43 out of the challenged 756 signatures as valid. However, the Committee still failed to provide the required 2,000 signatures of voters supporting the proposed candidate. Therefore, the Supreme Court dismissed the aforementioned complaint.