US sends election observers to Romania for presidential election rerun

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - The United States has sent a team of election observers to Romania ahead of a presidential election rerun, a senior U.S. official said on Friday, amid criticism in Washington of a decision to cancel the initial 2024 ballot.

Romania, a NATO and EU member, has found itself at the centre of a dispute between Europe and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump over the nature of democracy due to the decision in December to cancel an ongoing presidential vote due to suspicions of Russian meddling, which Moscow denies.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance has said Romania's annulment of the ballot after a far-right, pro-Russian candidate surged from relative obscurity to take the lead in the first round based on what he called "flimsy evidence" meant Bucharest did not share American values.

The first round of the election rerun takes place on Sunday, with a runoff vote schedule for May 18 if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote.

"We'll spend some time with the government discussing how the elections are conducted and … then on Sunday, we'll actually go out to polling locations, and we'll watch people vote," James E. Trainor III, Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission of the United States told reporters in Bucharest.

"As Vice President Vance has said, there's some questionable things that have happened... but at the end of the day, it's important to root out what these foreign influences are, because the worst thing that can happen for democracies is to have outside influences come in and drown out the voice of the people."

A Romanian government spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The cancellation of the election damaged the already fragile confidence of many Romanians in state institutions.

In the first round of that cancelled vote on Nov. 24, far-right candidate Calin Georgescu, who had been polling in single digits before the ballot, rose into first place amid an explosion of content on TikTok that favoured him.

A court barred Georgescu from standing in the rerun and now George Simion, leader of the radical right Alliance for Uniting Romanians (AUR), is leading in opinion polls.

Bucharest has tightened campaign rules to manage disinformation online, and on Friday the country's telecommunications regulator ANCOM said it had uncovered a network of 'Doppelganger' sites imitating government institutions and media outlets which was designed to spread misinformation.

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie and Alan Charlish, Editing by Louise Heavens)