site.btaMinor Discrepancies Found in Voting Records after Sofia Mayoral Elections

An expert examination found minor discrepancies between the number of voting machine printouts and the results registered by the voting machines in last autumn's election for mayor of Sofia. The conclusion is that Vassil Terziev, who became mayor, won a few hundred votes more than the official number, according to the two experts who conducted the examination and who spoke to the media on Friday.

Municipal Election Commission Secretary Borislav Tasev said the findings show that the votes for Terziev recorded on the memory sticks were 832 fewer than the number on the tally sheets from the section election commissions. In the case of runner-up Vanya Grigorova, the difference is under 300 votes.

The findings change nothing, Tasev argued. He noted that the memory stick data were ignored in the vote count. He said the aim was obviously to show that machine voting is not reliable.

Grigorova's lawyer Milka Hristova sees disturbing data on the memory sticks. The year recorded in some of the files is wrong. "We do not want to discredit machine voting but to identify the shortcomings," Hristova said.

According to Terziev's lawyers, there is no problem with the information on the memory sticks. The incorrect recording of the year in some cases was due to the use of different decrypting software programs. After the information was converted, there was no problem. There are no defects in machine voting, Terziev's lawyers argued.

The local elections in Sofia led runner-up Vanya Grigorova to challenge the results in court. The trial will resume on April 26. By that time the experts are expected to provide data off a few more memory sticks which are currently missing.