Bulgaria is going to 2 in 1 elections. As early as Monday, we expect the president to issue a decree with which the parliamentary and European vote will take place on June 9. With this, the preparation of the vote begins, which seems to be not an easy one.
For the first time, the sectional commissions will count twice the preferential vote. So far we have not had such a hypothesis. We will vote with two ballots – one will be for the European elections, the other for the early national elections. This was stated by the chairman of the Public Council at the CEC, Tsvetelina Peneva, to Nova TV.
„We know that machines are already printers. That is, what the members of the SEC relied on in previous elections - drawing up a machine protocol, we already know is not happening. It must be counted by hand. It is counted and counted in hours, she clarified.
The latest events – the withdrawal of the resignation of the chief secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Zhivko Kotsev, “point out that the elections started even before they were scheduled by presidential decree. But this is not surprising given the turbulent political environment. In the conditions of a working National Assembly, it becomes a field of election campaign”, stressed Peneva.
„The most important thing for the Ministry of Internal Affairs is to ensure the security of the election management, the security of the voter and peace of mind throughout the election campaign. We expect this to happen because there is talk of a bought and controlled vote. If we go to vote en masse, even if there is such a vote – it will be a small percentage," the chairman of the Public Council at the CEC also said.
„In the last few years, we have witnessed a systematic violation of the trust of the Bulgarians in the electoral process. And that's why the political parties are also to blame, which turned voting technology into part of the election rhetoric, she added.
„In the last elections, we saw that the voting in the first round was failed by the actions of the bodies of the electoral administration and the Ministry of e-governance. We never managed to find out who was responsible. "People's distrust of machine voting has increased," Peneva reported.