site.btaCentral Election Commission Puts Forward Ideas for Changes in Election Rules

March 12 (BTA) - The Central Election Commission (CEC) has put forward to the legislature ideas for election rule changes, including dropping the restrictions on the announcement of exit poll results, regulations for machine voting, setting a date for elections three months earlier, etc . This transpires from a 24 Chassa interview with CEC Chair Stefka Stoeva on Thursday.
The proposals are based on analyses of the 2019 elections for European Parliament and for local government in Bulgaria.
Stoeva says that the CEC will be able to roll out machine voting but the precise rules for that need to be formulated in the election code. She notes that at this stage there are a number of unresolved issues related to the acquisition, delivery, installation, storage and maintenance of voting machines. In addition, the Electoral Code, which has close to 500 provisions, is almost entirely intended for paper balloting. Therefore, the CEC chairman recommends that a new legal framework for machine voting be set out, which should be clearly outlined in the Electoral Code. Stoeva also argues that government bodes need to be assigned to oversee voting machine certification such as the State Agency for Metrological and Technical Supervision, the State Agency for Electronic Control, SANS and others.
According to its current organization, machine voting is applicable only to voting sections with more than 300 voters. It is not intended for voting abroad, in old people's homes, hospitals, prisons, etc. If the current version is maintained, machine voting will encompass approximately 9500 sections, Stoeva explained.
Machine voting was held for the first time in Bulgaria in 3,000 sections nationwide at the 2019 European Parliament elections. Only about 159,000 voters, or 7.59 per cent, voted by machine, and over 92 per cent did not. Therefore, the CEC recommends that the paper ballots not be dropped.
Additionally, the CEC chairman argues that due to time constraints for organizing and holding elections, the exact date should be scheduled at least 3 months before election day and the time between the first and second rounds of elections should be increased.
Another issue that the election commission wants to address is the announcement of exit poll results on election day in the media. Stoeva reports that during the first round of the 2019 local government elections the CEC received about 30 signals for violating the ban on publicizing election results. This indicates that the ban is being massively violated, which casts doubt on its practicality.
In addition, most results compiled by sociological agencies are published directly to social media and cannot be controlled by the CEC. This leads to an unequal situation between different media. Therefore, according to Stoeva, it is necessary that new technologies also be subject to regulation.
The CEC also has recommendations for improving electoral legislation relating to ballots and section protocols. The CEC estimates that some of the ballots are invalid because of Election Code provisions of which confuse voters. In addition, voting protocols are long and difficult to complete precisely because they require data which has nothing to do and is irrelevant to the election result, such as invalid party votes, so the CEC recommends that they be dropped entirely. NV/DT