site.btaFinance Minister: No Reason to Scrap Machine Voting

Commenting on several parliamentary parties' call for scrapping machine voting for the October 29 local elections due to security concerns, Bulgarian Finance Minister Assen Vassilev said on Friday that he sees no reason for that. "This is up to the Central Election Commission to decide, the Government does not have a say," he said on bTV. "As far as I understand, someone took a picture with a phone of how the machines work. I don't see how this can threaten the voting process," Vassilev added.

Earlier in the day, at two consecutive meetings Parliament's chair, deputy chairs and floor leaders discussed a State Agency for National Security’s report on machine voting. There Is Such a People Floor Leader Toshko Yordanov told the press that there should not be a single machine in Sunday's elections because, he argued, all the machines were compromised. GERB-UDF, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, Vazrazhdane, and BSP for Bulgaria also shared this concern.

"Machines do not count any votes at present. It just print out paper ballots, which will later be counted manually. It is basically a printer: you see your paper ballot and what is printed out. There is no way you will get cheated or someone to miscount any votes," Vassilev noted. 

The Finance Minister pointed out that paper ballot voting has always been problematic as it enables vote buying and makes possible errors in the tally sheet which, he said, were sometimes made deliberately.

"The Interior Ministry was quite active. Continue the Change (CC) has submitted many alerts about vote-buying. I think we had information about large organized groups in probably 30 settlements which we have reported to the Interior Ministry and they have followed up on the alerts," said Vassilev who is also CC Co-leader.