Our significant problem with the fairness of elections is primarily related to trust in the electoral process. And we will not restore the trust of Bulgarian citizens by imposing one technology instead of another, on the contrary, we will exacerbate the problem, explained CEC representative Tsvetozar Tomov in an interview with the Bulgarian National Radio.
In the program "Nedelya 150" he commented on the changes to the Electoral Code, the differences and similarities of voting machines and warned about the risks if the technology is changed. Tomov made the reservation that he was commenting in a personal capacity, and not on behalf of the CEC, because the Commission still does not have a position on the bill on amendments to the Electoral Code.
"There is no way to think that anything good will happen if we impose a new technology in the upcoming elections. It is better for the voter to be able to choose between paper and a machine. In Bulgaria, there is no proven attempt to manipulate an election result through machine protocols; out of 50,000 protocols, not one shows such a thing. But there is distrust in the machines, and it has become more acute after the CEC banned machine voting in the first round of machine voting in the local elections in 2023," Tomov also said.
He pointed out that "the national task should be to overcome or limit distrust":
"We can hold fair elections with both machines and paper. With paper, we have a lot of evidence of abuse. The problem is to overcome this, because it threatens the electoral process as a whole. We will not hold fair elections with such distrust."
According to him, the CEC must do everything possible to guarantee it, "but the CEC alone cannot". This should be the task of all institutions that are related to the electoral process – the caretaker government, the Ministry of Interior, "this should be a problem of the entire society".
Tsvetozar Tomov explained in detail the differences, advantages and disadvantages of the machines that we have and have voted on them and the new optical scanners that would eventually replace the current voting devices.
"In my opinion, if the elections are scheduled for mid-April, the period for implementing new technology cannot be so short. It should not be less than a year if we want it to be like it is done around the world. And whatever machine voting is introduced in Bulgaria, good testing must be done. Drastically shortening the deadlines for a new technology hides risks for the electoral process. Including the risk that people are not prepared to vote in this way and this leads to voter turnout", warned Tsvetozar Tomov.
And he explained that the machines - optical scanners - must be carefully tested, because in each country there are national peculiarities of the electoral process:
"In this case, the ballot paper must also be changed to use optical scanners. We currently do not know what the capacity of one scanner is within a day, as they are organized in Bulgarian elections. We literally do not know how many people can vote with one machine within election day. It may turn out that there are larger sections and one machine is not enough. From the statements so far, there is no discussion of more machines than polling stations. The reasoning is in this direction, as well as in the legal committee. I am not sure that it is so, maybe it is so, but without tests it is impossible to say definitively."
Tomol is categorical that the testing must be done sufficiently to be confident that "we comply with the election legislation and will not limit the rights of voters by introducing these machines".