A legal challenge was submitted on Tuesday by the representative of Chega’s candidacy for the Santo Tirso City Council. The issue arises from the Santo Tirso District Court’s rejection of a request for a “recount of the votes cast in the Santo Tirso City Council election,” which was filed last Thursday.
“The request was based on the very small number of votes separating the municipality’s candidacies (23),” said Tiago Silva Matos, advocating for this review “so that there would be no doubts that could compromise the security and certainty of the results obtained.”
The candidacy argues that “given the well-founded doubts regarding the votes considered null, this recount was deemed even more justified.”
The argument also states that the Santo Tirso Court “decided to simply follow what is recorded in the minutes of the General Count Assembly, which denied a full recount of the votes cast, considering (…) that a full recount is not contained in the general count operations, which, in their opinion, aim exclusively at null votes, based on Constitutional Court jurisprudence.”
The representative believes that “because the counting does not focus on all the votes for a given municipal body, but rather on null votes, at least the recount of validly expressed votes should have been admitted,” arguing that the “security and certainty of the results obtained should prevail (…) even more so in a case of evident proximity of the electoral results of the candidates involved.”
The PS won the elections for the Santo Tirso City Council, obtaining 51.96%, with a total of 21,579 votes and the election of six councilors, followed by the PSD/IL coalition, which reached 30.14% with 12,517 votes, electing the remaining three councilors. Chega was the third most voted force, with 8.60% and 3,573 votes counted.
Lusa sought a reaction from the head of the list, who declined, and from the reelected president of the Porto district municipality, Alberto Costa, but this was not possible at the time.
