site.btaVP Believes Central Election Commission "Did Its Job Perfectly Well" in Last Elections

Vice President Iliana Iotova believes that the Central Election Commission (CEC) did its job "perfectly well" in the local elections on October 29 and November 5. She was speaking to reporters in the town of Veliko Tarnovo on Wednesday and commented the Prime Minister's words of earlier the same day that CEC did a poor job, violated the Election Code and needs to be replaced.

The CEC controversy was prompted by its decision to ban machine voting in the first round of the local elections on October 29 over security breech allegations in a memo of the State Agency for National Security (SANS). The memo blamed the perceived breech on a deputy minister of electronic governance. The removal of machines from the voting process outraged one part of Bulgarian voters and some of the political parties, most notably the Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria coalition, which have been the staunchest proponents of machine voting throughout, and saw a conspiracy against it. A court of law subsequently allowed the return of machines for the mayoral runoffs on November 5. In a related plot line, Prime Minister  Nikolay Denkov demanded that the SANS chair, Plamen Tonchev, remove the deputy chair who put put the memo, Tonchev refuse to do that, Denkov then asked the President to back Tonchev's removal and the President made it clear he would not. Earlier on Wednesday, the Prime Minister said the President is overstepping his powers.

Iotova said in Veliko Tarnovo that "CEC received a very serious alert and the only thing they could do is remove the machines from the first round of voting". Had they acted otherwise, they would have been blamed of aiming to manipulate the elections, she added.

She admitted, however, that these were not the best elections. "There is no way I can say that the elections were successful when there were twice as many complaints of electoral violations, that there were again so many invalid ballots. It remains to see the decisions of the lawcourts where these complaints were lodged," Yotova added.

Commenting the Prime Minister's demand for replacement of the SANS leader and CEC, Iotova said:  "Somehow it has become a habit of the entire government to find fault in the CEC, in SANS, in other institutions." She added that at the same time "Bulgarian people are still waiting for answers to several questions" about the role of the Electronic Governance Ministry and the deputy minister in the perceived security breech. "We are also waiting for the results of the prosecutors' probe". 

The Vice President expects that the President's decision regarding the SANS chairman will be according to the Constitution and is solely up to him.