Comment by codedokode

> The candidate declared ZERO money spent in campaign

I thought to win you need to get more votes than competitors, not to spend more money.

Also, I think you are not seeing the obvious "backdoors" in law. Think for a second, why the punishment for errors in documentation or misreporting is barring a candidate from elections, and not a fine (or imprisonment for cases with serious fraud)? It is obviously intentional. It is relatively easy to make a mistake in documentation (given the large volume of documentation one has to deal with even in mayoral elections), and even more so if you manage to plant your man into candidate's staff or bribe/pressure someone dealing with documentation to "accidentally" make some mistakes.

Whenever you see some bureaucratic, complex procedures in election regulations (or any other law), be sure, they are intentional. The more documentation one needs to fill out correct, the more the chance to find mistakes there. And every mistake would be in the favor of whoever is in power.

Example: France, a popular, but unwanted, candidate barred from elections. Counter example: USA, where a convicted felon, who faked documentation multiple times, still won because of popular support.

In a democratic country the bar for removing a candidate should be exceptionally high. Definitely not decision of several unelected people friendly with the current government.

> TikTok bot farms including one linked to Kremlin boosting Kremlinescus posts

So what you are implying? The voters are dumb and will vote for whoever they saw in TikTok?

> you will find it weird that 25k asians are hitting like on a Romanian politician posts.

So if TikTok promoted Biden, he would win against Trump? Maybe they should replace Electoral College with like counting then and save money. Also, TikTok is mostly used by teenagers listening to dumb robotic music who have no right to vote anyway.

Also, talking about ads, TV also often provides unfair free ads to some candidates under the guise of "news". By the way Youtube - what a coincidence - also nowadays has "news" section on the main screen. Maybe the candidate skirted some rules regarding advertisement, but it's not like he stuffed fake ballots into the box.

And now think why would the voters want to vote for a random shady candidate rather than people who have been on TV screens for 20 years? Only because some evil puppeteer spent several grands on buying TikTok likes, dumb, ungrateful voters forgot about all the good things those candidates have been doing for them, and exorbitant growth of economy and their income?