Hopefully the goal of many was not to delegitimize the Constitutional Court before its pronouncement. This was stated to the Bulgarian National Radio by Prof. Yanaki Stoilov, constitutional judge, rapporteur on the election case.
"The Constitutional Court exists under the Constitution. Its abolition as an institution is within the powers of the Grand National Assembly".
He called for the defense of the existence of bodies that are able to protect the rights of citizens.
Prof. Yanaki Stoilov answered the question of whether there were grounds for annulling the entire vote.
"This question arose because in 3 of the 5 requests that were submitted to the Constitutional Court and that we united in one common case for consideration, the question was raised that these violations lead to the need for the entire election to be annulled.
The possible adoption of a decision to completely annul the elections, which would lead to the need to hold new ones, is a last resort. In order for the constitutional court to reach such a conclusion, there must be convincing evidence that the will of a large part of those who participated in the elections was affected to such an extent that it would completely change the result obtained.
What we did with the inspection in these more than 2,200 sections showed that there were numerous violations in the implementation of voting and reporting of election results during the election process, but it did not lead to drastic deviations that would provide grounds for respecting these requests.
In order for the court to allow a recount of all, which would reveal the full picture of the elections, there should be not only requests, but also allegations of certain violations in each of these sections, which are verifiable with a certain evidentiary standard. For many of the sections, no data was provided on what exactly is being disputed, so that the court could verify it. The court is not just an instance that must repeat the counting of votes cast.
We check through experts for the legal compilation of the election protocols. In this case, the check is not comprehensive, but for the sections that fell within the scope of the check. The records are in the Ruse and Stara Zagora regions - over 45%, in Kardzhali - over 41% percent of protocols, in which the most common mistake is that they were corrected. The requirement is that this protocol be signed by the members of the commission, that the correction that was made be marked. We see this correlation, which probably exists between the inclusion of people in the election commissions at the last moment and the presence of a number of violations in the compilation of the protocols.
The machine's memory stores information about when the voting ended and about the frequency of voting conducted in each hour. Polling stations were set up in Turkey and Kardzhali, where it is said that a vote in the most active part of the day took an average of 45-50 seconds. There are both preceding and subsequent actions in the vote. The votes are for two parties in over 90%. But it is assumed that there should be control between those competing for these votes.
Whether the voting technology will be with machines or with paper, if there are no strict actions in the commissions so that the representatives of the different parties can control each other and monitor the legality of the entire process, abuses are possible.
The most important phase of the election process is what happens from the opening of the election day to the counting of the ballots, the filling in and submission of the protocols. After that, a controlling body can only ascertain some of the violations".
The lack of video surveillance and video recording in 43 polling stations gave us grounds to admit these stations for inspection, but not to declare the elections in them illegal, Stoilov further explained.
"Our reasons contain many findings and politicians can take the next step. If we have high-quality video recording and a clear announcement of who the respective vote is for – to see whether it corresponds to what is on the ballot, then video recording could become a means of evidence. This is a comprehensive logic that needs to be developed.
Changes have been made that worsen the legislative process. The printing of a protocol from the machines was removed. They were the only ones who had to print the ballots to maintain the impression of machine voting".
Prof. Stoilov explained that the court followed the practice established when challenging previous election appeals.
"There is one problem with the procedure - it is not regulated in detail in the Election Code. We work with provisions contained in the code. We apply the general rules. This explains why we published the materials and expert opinions in full after the case was completed".