The ultimate Court present announces that the public sitting, the intent of which will be to adopt a resolution confirming the validity of the elections of the president of the Republic of Poland held on 18 May 2025 and 1 June 2025 (NSW 9779/25) will take place on 1 July.
Since the end of the second circular of presidential elections, the ultimate Court has officially received 10 515 electoral protests that have been registered and are formally pending recognition. According to the SN data, 98 protests have been investigated so far, leaving them without further ado, and 3 were found to be reasonable – although without affecting the result of the vote.
However, erstwhile letters inactive pending registration and many applications combined in the framework of joint proceedings are added together, the nearly 50,000 papers entering the SN with allegations of the conduct or result of the vote. This scale – from 10 to almost 50 1000 separate writings – puts the ultimate Court in a situation of historical overload. The request to coordinate the work of many departments, the preliminary formal evaluation and the substantive examination of each protest absorbs immense judicial and administrative resources, giving emergence to the hazard of extending the word of designation and further exacerbating the force on judges.
The SN press spokesperson, justice Aleksander Stępkowski, stressed that Polish electoral regulations do not supply for the anticipation of recalculating votes in all regional electoral committees. Similarly, prof. Marek Safjan, erstwhile president of the Constitutional Court, and justice of the CJEU, said that the only procedure for examining individual electoral protests is not to conduct a universal audit of all electoral districts.
Despite the deficiency of grounds for a nationwide conversion, The ultimate Court re-examined ballot cards and converted votes in those regional committees where electoral protests showed crucial procedural irregularities. The first provisions take into account evidence from the examination of 13 regional electoral commissions – in Krakow, Gdańsk, Bielsko-Biała or Minsk Mazowiecki – where during the second circular there were weaknesses in the preparation of protocols or in the analysis of voting cards.
The admission of specified evidence shall take place only as part of ongoing protests and not in the average proceedings. This means that only sovereignly justified infringement charges can lead to a physical recalculation of votes.
Electoral protest procedure – narrow control limits
Pursuant to Article 82 of the Electoral Code, an electoral protest against the validity of the election of the president of the Republic of Poland can only be made due to a crime against elections or a violation of voting rules, the determination of voting results or election results that have actually affected the election outcome. The ultimate Court first examines the formal conditions for bringing a protest and then the substantive reasons for the allegations raised therein. In practice, this requires the complainants to show circumstantial deficiencies, which in rule limits the anticipation of obtaining a recalculation of votes only to cases of manifest infringements.
Consequences of overburdening SN – time limits and quality of judgments
Such a large number of registered protests forced hundreds of cases to join together in comparatively fewer separate group proceedings. Although this optimization partially relieves the burden on the service offices and secretariats, it besides imposes a considerable burden on each panel of judges, who have respective twelve – or even respective 100 – of the charges in 1 procedure.
There are voices among the SN judges that there is simply a real hazard of extending the deadlines for resolutions and resolutions, which, under political conditions of tension, may lead to social force and doubts about the timely termination of proceedings. In addition, any experienced judges refuse to take part in disputes of an election nature, which forces them to reorganise work and staff transfers within the Tribunal.
What will the July 1 gathering bring?
At its public sitting on 1 July 2025 at 1 p.m., the judges of the ultimate Court are to adopt a resolution on the validity of the election of the president of the Republic of Poland. This resolution will not prescribe a general calculation of all votes, but will find whether, on the basis of recognised protests and analysis of accepted evidence with the essential care, any irregularities have not distorted the final result of the vote.
If the resolution confirms the validity of the elections, this will mean accepting the electoral process as it has been so far, indicating that the charges in the selected committees have been clarified by recalculation. Otherwise, the SN could, which is improbable in the light of the criteria adopted, re-examine the case at a lower level.
