Zenonas Vaigauskas, chairman of the commission, said the panel found it the most difficult to establish whether the reported election violations could have affected the final election results.
"The most demanding task for the Central Electoral Commission was to establish the scope of the violations and to say whether the scope of the violations caused a considerable change to the election results or whether the results were still stable. More than 1.3 million voters cast ballots in the elections – were the violations so grave that they would cross out the will of all Lithuanian voters in multi-mandate voting?" the chairman told journalists after a five-hour meeting.
In its approval of the results of multi-mandate voting, the commission said that "violations were committed in the multi-mandate area during the 2012 parliamentary elections, however, they did not have a major effect upon the final election results in the area."
The commission rejected a suggestion from member Liutauras Ulevičius to invalidate the results – in his words, the commission should have deemed multi-mandate voting results invalid due to multiple gross violations of the law, many of them still under investigation.
The electoral panel also rejected the request from the National Union to annul the election results due to gross violations.
In Lithuania, 70 parliamentarians are elected in multi-mandate voting through party lists, and the remaining 71 are picked in single-mandate voting. However, the 2012 elections will leave one seat vacant, as results of Zarasai-Visaginas area were invalidated due to violations. Repeated elections in the area will have to be held in no more than six months. The 24 February is one of the proposed dates but the timing is still to be decided by the Central Electoral Commission.
The general parliamentary elections on 14 October and the second round in single-mandate districts on 28 October elected 140 representatives.
According to the approved results, the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party will have 38 mandates, followed by the Homeland Union – Lithuanian Christian Democrats (33), the Labour Party (29), the Order and Justice party (11), the Liberal Movement (10), the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (8) and the Path of Courage party (7). Three independent candidates and a member of the Lithuanian Peasant and Greens Union were elected.
