The Central Election Commission (CEC), in coordination with the Council of Ministers, determines the terms and conditions for the production, delivery and storage of election papers and materials, adopted on second reading the parliamentary legal committee, which began the discussion on second reading of a general bill on amendments to the Electoral Code, BTA reported.
The Council of Ministers exercises control over the storage of optical devices for scanning ballots, and the CEC - over the production, delivery and storage of election papers and materials, the legal committee decided. The previous text, according to which the government takes care of the storage of "technical devices for machine voting", is abolished.
Nadezhda Yordanova from "Continuing the Change-Democratic Bulgaria" expressed concern that an attempt is actually being made to vote only on paper in the next elections and to count only manually. We claim that it is impossible to find these optical devices in the next two months, she explained. According to her, these devices could violate the secrecy of the vote.
If the Council of Ministers cannot implement these provisions for the upcoming elections, we have planned for the voting to remain as it is at the moment, explained the chairwoman of the legal committee Anna Alexandrova (GERB-SDF).
Tsvetozar Tomov from the CEC believes that the committee should retain its control functions regarding the certification of voting machines.
Do not make suggestions that these optical devices violate the secrecy of the vote, said Nikoleta Kuzmanova from "There is such a people". She recalled that the idea of optical devices to count votes was an idea put forward in the bill by "Continuing the Change-Democratic Bulgaria".
"Continuing the Change-Democratic Bulgaria" today withdrew last year's proposal for counting centers and optical devices for scanning paper ballots and devices for scanning identity documents.