27 candidate pairs are entering the race for “Dondukov“ 2, and during the machine voting, voters will see them on two pages on the screen. The budget for the presidential elections is nearly 117 million euros, and a possible second round is also foreseen in it.
How we will vote on October 25 and how the preparations for the vote are going, explained the spokesperson for the new staff of the Central Election Commission, Assoc. Prof. Stoyanka Balova.
The large number of candidates will not mean long scrolling through the machine screen.
“We will see them on two pages. There will be 14 per page“, explained Balova.
The first page will feature 14 candidate pairs, and the second - the remaining 13 and the option “I do not support anyone“.
The CEC has already determined that machine voting will be available in all sections, except for those with less than 300 voters and some other categories of sections provided for in the Electoral Code.
The budget approved by the government for the presidential elections is 116.928 million euros. It includes the costs of preparing and conducting the vote, including in the event of a possible second round.
Balova specified that the funds that are directly in the CEC budget for the activities she spoke about in the interview are about 3 million euros. According to her, these also include the estimated remuneration of the section and district election commissions and technical assistants.
This time, the sections outside Bulgaria are expected to be more. Their final number should become clear after October 4.
The state has about 12,800 voting machines. According to the CEC spokesperson, a survey conducted at the end of last year found about 2,500 devices that had failed in previous elections.
Balova added that the machines have not been repaired since 2021, when they were purchased by the state. Diagnostics and preventive maintenance are pending, and where necessary - and repairs.
The problems identified are different - from printers and displays to motherboards.
The CEC plans to replace the batteries and flash drives of all about 12,800 devices.
After the end of election day, the official result of the machine voting will be that of the protocol printed by the device, Balova explained.
The control receipts will also be counted and their results will be entered into the protocol.
The goal is to be able to check between what the machine reports and the physical receipts.
“The other is for the purpose of interception“, explained the CEC spokesperson about the manual count.
According to her, this way citizens will have the opportunity to more easily track whether the number of voters and the number of receipts match.
For election day, it is planned to have about 3,000 technicians in the country and abroad, as well as a support center. In the event of a problem, an attempt will first be made to fix the problem as quickly as possible. If this proves impossible, after notifying the regional election commission, the section will switch to voting with paper ballots.
Therefore, each section commission will also have the necessary number of paper ballots.
Balova pointed out that in the previous elections, 103 machines out of nearly 10,000 devices used broke down - about 1%.
The CEC hopes that after the large-scale preventive maintenance, the number of problematic devices will be significantly smaller.