Ballots in one-fifth of the precincts will be recounted. Thousands of sacks of papers from the October 27 vote will be opened by 18 experts, as the Constitutional Court ruled, after uniting in one common case the five cases initiated by appeals attacking the results of the parliamentary elections, BNT reported.
However, the subject of the inspection will not be the scandalous violations that we saw from the video surveillance.
For the first time, the Constitutional Court has ordered an inspection on such a scale - the bags with ballots in 1,777 sections will be opened and counted anew, and what is written in the flash memories of the machines will be compared. In 442 sections, it will be compared whether the invalid ballots entered in the protocols are really such. 18 experts - mainly former chairmen and members of the CEC - tackle this task. One of them is Alexander Andreev. He suggests that they will be divided into groups to cover the whole country. As well as that they will meet the deadline of January 10.
"By accordingly checking the records and ballots in the sections specified in the definition and ascertaining whether there is indeed a discrepancy in the data entered in the records of the section election commissions with what will be found in the counting of actual and invalid voices. Until now, there has been no census in such a volume", said Alexander Andreev, lawyer, former chairman of the CEC.
In any case, experts are preparing for long hours of counting similar to what happened in front of the TV cameras in November 2023. Then the elections for municipal councilors in Kavarna were annulled, but by the Administrative Court in Dobrich. And what follows if the expertise now finds different results than those entered as official results:
"The Constitutional Court, on the basis of this expertise and the arguments of the applicants, to make its decision and assess whether the elections should be canceled, in what part of the sections they should be canceled, if they are canceled at all, and how will change election results. The calculation of the mandates based on the decision of the SC will be done by "Information Service". Information service will provide as a methodology the calculations of the change in mandates, but from now on the decision will be of the CEC, which must determine whether we will have fewer or more mandates for a certain political force, whether a new political force will pass the barrier and enter parliament and what mandates it will take".
"For the first time in the history of Bulgarian electoral practice, the Constitutional Court will have to rule on the meaning of video surveillance. So far, there have only been decisions by administrative courts across the country and the Supreme Court, which have considered video surveillance as an element of their decision-making," said Stefan Manov, Deputy Chairman of the CEC.
In 2010, the Constitutional Court annulled the election results in 23 sections in Turkey and ordered the cancellation of all votes cast in them. The result - one mandate was taken away from DPS. There were two cases then, on which the Supreme Court issued a decision. At that time, Andreev was a member of the CEC.
"There it was found that more voters had voted in certain sections than was possible, from then on this led to displacement in one region in Bulgaria," pointed out Alexander Andreev, lawyer, former chairman of the CEC.
"The SC had two cases after the 2009 elections. In the first case, 24 wrongly recorded votes for the then "Blue Coalition" were corrected. in a Ruse section. I.e. we see both possible approaches - either it fixes a particular election result because there are enough elements to do so, or the cashier completely removes votes from certain sections. What is to come - we will see", commented Stefan Manov, Deputy Chairman of the CEC.
The most sections in which there will be a recount are in Blagoevgradsko. And another curious thing - those in which there is only a two-vote discrepancy between what is written in the protocols and the flash memories of the machines have been removed from the list of sections. And the CEC has already received the decision of the Central Committee, which asks the commission to answer why there was no video surveillance in some sections.