About 100,000 Voters In Bucharest To Elect New Lawmaker Sunday

Voters will have to choose between former TV host Teodora Trandafir, 42, who is running of behalf of the country's ruling democratic Liberal Party, and former National Lottery chief Liliana Minca, 41, of the opposition Conservative Party.

Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 9 p.m..

The lawmaker seat for the 19th constituency in Bucharest has been vacant since February, when conservative Daniela Popa left Parliament to join the board of directors of the country's insurance regulator.

During this by-election, Romania's Standing Electoral Authority is also testing a web application aiming to prevent illegal voting. The application, developed by the electoral authority and the country's special telecom service STS, aims to prevent multiple voting, underage voting, or the use of ID cards with forged personal numbers, and also allows voter turnout to be reported in real time. Every piece of information is queried from and transmitted to a central database.

A third hopeful, former presidential candidate Remus Cernea of the Green Party, had wanted to run for the vacant lawmaker seat, but the local electoral office rejected his candidacy saying independents are not allowed to run in by-elections.

Cernea called on the Constitutional Court which deemed the legal provision banning independents from running in by-elections unconstitutional. However, Cernea may run in future by-elections because the Court ruling came too late for him to have his candidacy accepted for Sunday's race.

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