It started with a petition.
As “Rzeczpospolita”, work on the petition submitted by the Good State Foundation was started in late September in the legislature Committee on Petitions. This foundation claims that election silence is commonly broken on the net and has a crucial impact on the simplification of attendance.
However, the Senators did not scope unanimity during the debate. In the end, they decided to consult the Ministry of Interior and Administration, after which they would decide on election silence.
Jolanta Piotrowska of the KO noted that for the time being only private opinions were presented. “Rzeczpospolita” stressed that the State Electoral Commission had twice called for the abolition of electoral silence, and last time this happened in March that year.
The advice on changes to the electoral code indicated that "the electoral silence should only apply on the electoral venue's voting day, i.e. only inside the building in which it is located, and within a radius e.g. 100 metres from the building".
Current legal status
For now, however, the old rules governing electoral silence proceed to work. In our country, it has been in force since 1990 and starts at midnight on the day before the elections, but ends after the closing of the polling stations. It besides applies to the referendum campaign.
Violation of election silence is treated as an offence for which a fine is punishable. The violations include not only conducting agitation, but besides all forms of political advertising. The law permits the posting of posters which have been placed before silence, but fresh ones cannot be entered.
Encouraging participation in elections shall not constitute a breach of silence provided that it does not concern a circumstantial candidate or election committee. In turn, insisting on voting in a referendum that affects attendance is considered to be a violation of referendum silence, as it determines whether this referendum is binding.
Electoral silence. Needed or expendable?
The question here is whether voter silence as any kind of legal tool presently makes any sense. The main argument cited by this foundation can be considered to be the universality of the Internet. Lukasz Lipiński from the weekly “Politics” besides wrote about the request for change.
Lipiński suggested that erstwhile assessing the reasonableness of election silence consider each regulation individually. any may seem obsolete, while others may be valuable to preserve. The author peculiarly critically assessed the ban on publication of polls on the day of the vote, arguing that in the era of the net it is hard to enforce it.
An example of the failure of specified restrictions was the viral entries on social media regarding the proportion of vegetables in vegetable salad on parliamentary election day 2011. any of them are besides certain to remember a situation where the results or candidates of the election were not spoken directly, but any food products were substituted. For example, Paweł Kukiz was presented as a bar “Pawełek”.
In addition, more or little European countries do not have electoral silence. The Germans abolished it after planet War II. In turn, Britain has never had it (although it is punished to take photographs in the election booth or photos of the voting card itself). However, in the Czech Republic, voter silence is even more restrictive than ours, as it applies as many as 2 days.
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