The Central Election Commission has issued instructions that voting machines must not leave the warehouse and must not be transported to polling stations, CEC Chair Kameliya Neykova said in a televised interview on Saturday.
Still, some machines have apparently reacjed the voting sections, despite a CEC decision adopted on Friday to eliminate this voting method from the October 29 local elections. CEC Spokesperson Rositsa Mateva said on Saturday that CEC had not permitted the removal of the machines from the warehouse and urged the Interior Minister to say who gave such a permission.
The Interior Ministry, which has to escort the voting equipment, said that it had received a letter from CEC late Friday evening instructing it to take the machines back from the regional capitals to a cargo centre. "The Interior Ministry will implement the law. We will do everything necessary to take the machines to the required destinations," Interior Ministry Secretary General Zhivko Kotsev told Nova TV on Saturday.
In a position released later in the day, the Ministry said that, based on two letters from CEC to the Director of the Directorate General of Gendarmerie, Special Operations and Counter-terrorism of October 26, escorting of the transport vehicles carrying the machines to the section election commissions countrywide began on October 27. The first truck load of machines left the warehouse at 1:40 p.m. on Friday, the Ministry specified.
/MR/
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