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Elections 2016–2025 · 3,178 towns and communes

Deva votes like all of Romania. Does your town?

For more than 60 years, Vigo County in Indiana backed the winner of every US presidential election, until its streak broke in 2020; local experts put it down mostly to luck. Romania has a different kind of bellwether. Of 3,178 towns and communes, Deva, a county seat in Transylvania, voted closest to the whole country on average across nine national ballots from 2016 to 2025. To vote exactly like Romania, about 5.8 voters in 100 would have had to choose differently. A typical place sits 21.4 points away.

Pick your town on the map or type its name. Map: every commune and town, by how close it voted to the country. The stronger the colour, the closer the vote. Click the map to pick a place.

Deva

Deva, ballot by ballot#

In the 2016 election for the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of parliament) and the 2019 European Parliament election, none of the 3,178 ranked places voted closer to the country than Deva. In the first round of the 2019 presidential election, Klaus Iohannis took 36.4% in Deva and 36.7% nationwide.

Deva did not come first every time. It was 318th in the 2025 runoff and 216th in the 2024 European election. Its first place comes from the average: on almost every ballot Deva stayed close to the country, even when other places got closer.

Deva's distance from the country, in points, and its rank among 3,178 places, on each ballot. * Annulled by the Constitutional Court.
Ballot	Distance	Rank
Chamber of Deputies, 2016	4.6	1
European Parliament, 2019	5.0	1
Presidential 2019, round 1	4.6	2
Presidential 2019, round 2	1.3	194
European Parliament, 2024	11.7	216
Presidential 2024, round 1 (annulled)	6.3	6
Chamber of Deputies, 2024	9.4	4
Presidential 2025, round 1	5.4	38
Presidential 2025, round 2	3.8	318

Distance

What one point means#

The distance is how many votes in 100 would have to move from one party or candidate to another for the place to match the country's shares exactly. In the 2024 Chamber election, PSD (the Social Democrats) took 22.8% in Deva and 23.6% nationwide, and AUR (the Alliance for the Union of Romanians) 15.1%, against 17.3%. The gaps over every list, added up and halved (one vote moved lowers one list and raises another), come to 9.4 points. Zero would be a perfect copy of the country.

The comparison uses only votes cast inside Romania. Votes cast abroad change the reference shares and can change the ranking: against the official result including the diaspora, Deva drops to 80th in the first round of 2025 and 555th in the runoff.

The test

The test on later elections#

A place can land close to the country by chance, especially a small one. The rule was written before the 2024–2025 votes were compared with the country: the ten closest places were picked on the four ballots of 2016–2019 only, then scored on the four of 2024–2025.

The ten went from 6.5 to 10.8 points. If each of the ten is swapped for a place drawn at random from the same county and size group, the average comes to 14.3; in 110 of 10,000 such draws the average was as small or smaller. With places of the same size from anywhere, the average is 17.2.

Deva stayed fifth. Beiuș, second in 2016–2019, fell to 536th, and Cavnic, sixth, to 871st. Reșița, twelfth, rose to 2nd.

The 20 closest places on 2016–2019 (left) and their rank on 2024–2025 (right, log scale). Thick line: Deva.

The closest

Where else votes like the country#

Across all nine ballots, after Deva come Reșița (6.4), Roman (7.1), the commune of Bănești in Prahova (7.2), Hunedoara (7.5) and Focșani (7.6). Four of the first eight are in Hunedoara county: Deva, Hunedoara, Simeria and Orăștie. As a group, the places closest to the country in 2016–2019 stayed closer than others in 2024–2025, though each one rose or fell. Why these places in particular, the data do not say.

The top 20, nine ballots

Hunedoara · 5.8
Caraș-Severin · 6.4
Neamț · 7.1
Prahova · 7.2
Hunedoara · 7.5
Vrancea · 7.6
Hunedoara · 7.8
Hunedoara · 7.8
Brașov · 7.8
Prahova · 7.8
Alba · 8.0
Cluj · 8.1
Călărași · 8.2
Suceava · 8.2
Ilfov · 8.2
Brașov · 8.3
Suceava · 8.4
Vaslui · 8.6
Dâmbovița · 8.6
Alba · 8.7

Counties

As close as a whole county#

A county (județ, Romania has 41 plus Bucharest) mixes dozens of different places, and their differences cancel out. Across the nine ballots the closest county is Maramureș (5.9 points), then Prahova (6.2). Deva, a single town, reaches 5.8, about as close as the closest county.

On 2016–2019, Prahova was the closest county (6.0 points), and it reached 6.5 in 2024–2025, a little above Deva's 6.25.

Far away

Furthest from the country#

At the other end are ten communes in Harghita, between 73.4 and 74.2 points away. On the six ballots with a list or candidate of UDMR (the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania), the party of the Hungarian minority or its candidate took between 78 and 88 votes in 100 in Harghita county and between 4 and 7 nationwide. Harghita (62.6) and Covasna (52.4) are the only counties more than 50 points from the country.

Furthest from the country: ten communes

Harghita · 74.2
Harghita · 74.2
Harghita · 74.1
Harghita · 74.1
Harghita · 74.0
Harghita · 74.0
Harghita · 73.8
Harghita · 73.7
Harghita · 73.6
Harghita · 73.4

Big cities sit far away too: Bucharest ranks 1,146th (19.3 points), Timișoara 1,291st, Cluj-Napoca 2,564th. Of the cities averaging at least 60,000 valid votes per ballot, the closest is Craiova, at 37th.

Annulled round

The annulled round and the 2024 European vote#

On 6 December 2024, in its Ruling no. 32, the Constitutional Court annulled the whole presidential election process, after the first round of 24 November and two days before the runoff set for 8 December; the election was rerun in May 2025. The votes had been cast and counted, so they show how each place voted that day, and the round stays in the average, marked with an asterisk. Without it, Deva still ranks first (5.7 points).

Voting like the country is not the same as picking the winner. In the annulled round, Elena Lasconi came first in Deva (20.6%), while Călin Georgescu came first nationwide (21.0%). Vigo County matched winners; the distance here compares every share, from first place to last.

In the European Parliament election of 9 June 2024, Deva ranked 216th (11.7 points): the PSD–PNL alliance took 37.8% in Deva and 49.2% nationwide. That vote was held on the same day as the local elections, which can pull a place away from the national mix; these data cannot show whether that happened in Deva. The ten places picked on 2016–2019 stayed at 8.8 points on this ballot too, against 21.2 for a typical place.

Chance

Small places and chance#

If 300 voters were drawn at random from the whole country, their vote would land, by chance alone, about 9.5 points from the country in the 2024 Chamber election and 1.8 points in the 2025 runoff. So every town's card also shows, for comparison, the distance of a random group of the same size: a small commune can land far from the country just because it is small.

A runoff has only two candidates, so the distance is the gap between one candidate's share in the place and the same candidate's share nationwide, and many places land near zero. Without the two runoffs, Deva still ranks first (6.7 points).

How it was calculated#

For each ballot, the valid votes from every polling station in a place (a town or commune, by its SIRUTA code; Bucharest is one unit) were added up and compared with the valid votes from the whole country, leaving out stations abroad. The distance is half the sum of the absolute gaps between shares, over every party and candidate: the smallest number of votes in 100 that would have to move. The overall ranking is the average over nine ballots.

3,178 places are ranked, those with at least 100 valid votes on every ballot. Three very small communes (Brebu Nou, Dalnic, Bătrâna) had fewer than 100 votes on some ballots and appear on the map without a rank. Two misspelt names in the 2019 European file (Lugașu de Jos, Mavrodin) were matched to their communes, and the town of Băneasa (Constanța), whose SIRUTA code changed, was followed under both codes.

The test rule was written on 6 November 2026, in the test script's header, before the 2024–2025 distances were computed: pick on 2016–2019, score on 2024–2025, compare with 10,000 random draws, with replacement, of places of the same size (the same tenth by mean votes over all ballots) and, separately, of the same size and county. The size groups and the 100-vote floor also use the number of voters in 2024–2025; the 2024–2025 shares play no part in the picking. The 2024 European election was added after the test, as one more ballot not used for picking. The rank correlation between the two periods, over all places, is 0.65 (Spearman).

The 2020 Chamber election is missing: the AEP file for Bucharest could not be downloaded, and the only copy found did not match AEP's totals in a test county. Local elections are left out because they have no national vote to compare with. The 2024 European file comes from Code for Romania's copy of the AEP data and is marked provisional; AEP's own final file could not be downloaded. SIRUTA codes link the same places across all ballots; registered voters jump more than 1.5 times in only 55 places, and in most of them the jump appears only in the 2024 Chamber file.

The random-group distance comes from a simulation: for each ballot, 400 groups of voters drawn by the national shares at 60 sizes from 80 to 1.2 million votes; each place gets the median at its size (interpolated), averaged over the nine ballots. The page neither praises nor criticises any vote: the distance shows only how differently a place voted from the country.

The per-station files on prezenta.roaep.ro state no licence; AEP's dataset on data.gov.ro is published under CC BY 4.0. The page publishes only per-place totals computed from them, with AEP cited as the source.