Romania Vote Called Valid Despite Flaws

The National Salvation Front unfairly dominated Romania’s election campaign, and its supporters stuffed ballot boxes, stumped at the polls and intimidated voters, but the results of Sunday’s vote should nevertheless be accepted as valid, foreign observers said Monday.

The front and its presidential candidate, Ion Iliescu, are expected to post a resounding victory once the protracted ballot-counting is concluded, which election officials now say may be as late as Friday.

Opposition leaders cried foul a day after Romania’s first multi-party election since 1937, deeming the front-dominated campaign to be a mockery of the democratic process. But representatives of U.S. and European observers who fanned out across Romania to watch Sunday’s vote appeared to excuse most of the suspect incidents as isolated and likely to be irrelevant to the outcome.

“Romanians have taken a very giant step toward democracy,” said New Mexico’s Gov. Garrey E. Carruthers, who headed a six-person team observing the vote on behalf of the White House. “In our view it was a proper election.”

He said that numerous irregularities were reported to the presidential delegation but that the delegation failed to spot any “obvious, systematic fraud.”

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the Romanian election appeared to be “free, peaceful and enthusiastic” despite a campaign that he described as “flawed.”

“This is an important beginning for Romania,” he said.

Reading an official Bush Administration assessment, Boucher said: “Election-day activities were peaceful. Voter turnout on election day was heavy. . . . We note that problems with voting and other election-day irregularities appear to have been minimal, although opposition political party leaders have complained of breaches of election law procedures.

“However, the election campaign was flawed, as we and others have noted,” he said, citing “lack of access to the media and intimidation of opposition candidates.”

Boucher said no decisions have been made yet about whether the United States will extend economic aid to the new Romanian regime.

A 60-member international observer force put together by the U.S. National Democratic Institute and its Republican counterpart was more critical of the Romanian vote but likewise said that the final outcome “deserves our respect.”

“Any judgment on the Romanian elections, the first multi-party electoral contests in nearly half a century, must take into account the national trauma inflicted on the people of Romania by decades of brutal Communist dictatorships,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) told reporters.

The group’s report accused the interim government, which is controlled by the front, of failing to “promptly and vigorously condemn incidents of intimidation, including attacks on opposition candidates and party activists.”

Ballot box-stuffing was reported from several precincts, and the observers presented one ballot that they obtained from a voter that had been stamped in advance in favor of the front.

“I’m a politician, and I know a greased election when I see it,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who visited 40 polling places in and around Timisoara, the city where the bloody revolt against dictator Nicolae Ceausescu began last December.

Thugs identified by local residents as former members of the Securitate were seen hanging around some rural polling places, said Austria’s Andreas Kohl, who led a European Parliament delegation to observe the vote.

Some observers attributed voting violations such as campaigning outside the polling place or election committee workers entering the booth with elderly or infirm voters to ignorance of the democratic process and Romania’s new election law.

Voters had 88 parties to contend with, and in many districts there were three- or four-hour waits to cast ballots. Turnout was estimated at about 90% of Romania’s eligible voters, a figure Central Election Bureau officials have yet to settle on. The election-monitoring board said two weeks ago that 17.8 million Romanians were of voting age but dropped that estimate to 15.7 million over the weekend, then boosted it to 16.8 million Monday.

Despite installation of a nationwide computer system to assist in compiling the vote count, only a sliver of the vote had been tabulated a full day after the polls closed.

An exit poll conducted by the West German INFAS firm, the only national forecast available Monday, gave 83% of the presidential vote to Iliescu and two-thirds of the 506 parliamentary seats to the front.

The sparse returns trickling into Bucharest from the provinces tended to support the exit poll’s predictions. With about 15% of the presidential ballot counted, Iliescu had 89% of the vote, according to the Central Election Bureau. However, the vote is expected to vary widely among precincts, and opinion surveys are unreliable in Romania.

Front candidates maintained a low profile, with Iliescu declining to comment on the West German forecast even to the state news agency, Rompress.

His opponents were quick to denounce the ballot and its projected outcome.

“The elections should be declared null and void, a violation of democracy,” said an outraged Ion Ratiu, the millionaire emigre who returned earlier this year to mount a presidential campaign under the banner of the newly reconstituted National Peasants Party.

He later played a videotape for journalists that showed campaign workers assisting some rural voters inside the voting booth, a violation of the election law, and a shipment of ballot boxes in the hands of front supporters that were intercepted by authorities.

Ratiu said he will challenge the election outcome in court if the final figures tally with the INFAS projection, which reported only 6% support for the 73-year-old candidate.

“I find the results exaggerated, monstrously so,” the Liberal Party’s presidential candidate, Radu Campeanu, said of the poll that gave him 11% support. “They remind me of the returns in Ceausescu’s time.”

The front took power after Ceausescu was toppled Dec. 22 and executed Dec. 25. The image of Iliescu waving to crowds of revolutionaries from the corner balconies of the charred and bullet-riddled buildings facing the revolution’s central battleground was likely a major boon for his campaign. Ratiu and Campeanu were both still living abroad when Ceausescu was overthrown.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster, in Washington, contributed to this story.