PN to follow-up judicial process on vote recounts

The Nationalist Party may appeal a court decision which rejected its request for a recount of the votes cast in the general election on the eighth and the thirteenth electoral district, newly-elected MP Paula Mifsud Bonnici indicated this evening. "We obviously respect the court decision but we will follow-up the judicial process," Dr Mifsud Bonnici, president of the PN national council, said on Radio 101 this afternoon. She said that mistakes made in the counting of the ballot papers on the eighth and thirteenth districts meant that the PN had been denied two parliamentary seats. According to the established formula, she argued, the difference in parliament between the PL and th PN should be seven seats, not nine. The Constitutional Court had turned down the PN requests, saying there was no juridical need to have the recounts. The court said that there might be instances where mistakes can’t be corrected In this case, the court said, the candidates were not going to suffer any “prejudice” because they were still going to get elected. Under the Constitution, the court observed, four seats had to be be credited to the Nationalist Party to achieve representation in Parliament...