site.btaUPDATED Prosecutors Follow Clues of Missing Ballots from October 2024 Parliamentary Elections

The Sofia City Prosecution Office (SCPO) is conducting a check in connection with information that ballots are missing from the last legislative elections held in October 2024, the prosecution service said in a press release on Tuesday.

The prosecutors’ case file was instituted on March 7, acting on an alert from Information Services PLC.

The State Agency for National Security has been assigned to conduct a check.

Earlier on Tuesday, Information Services (IS) issued a position specifying that they have not made available to the SCPO expert witness reports sent to IS by the Constitutional Court or any copies of these reports. The company said that on March 10 the prosecution office required the submission of all materials from the computer processing and the entry of data based on these reports which have been transmitted by the Constitutional Court care of the Central Election Commission (CEC).

"It is inadmissible that the work of the Constitutional Court should be made dependent on actions or inactions of other state bodies," the Court’s President Pavlina Panova said in a televised statement on Monday evening. She said that IS have delivered the materials to the SCPO without permission from the Constitutional Court.

Constitutional Court Refuses to Submit Documents

“In a constitutional case that is not yet disposed of, the Constitutional Court is not bound to provide the documents specified by the prosecution office,” the Court wrote in a reply to the SCPO published on the Court’s website.

“The Constitutional Court is a body independent of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government and is guided only by the provisions of the Constitution and of the Constitutional Court Act. The activity of the Court is also regulated in the Regulations on the Organization of the Activities of the Constitutional Court. In accordance with these rules, until the Court has ruled, the information on constitutional cases that is subject to publication is made public on the website of the Constitutional Court,” the reply to the SCPO reads.

Earlier in the day, the Court said on its website that at 10 a.m. on Tuesday it received a request from the SCPO, signed by prosecutor Violeta Marcheva, to provide a number of documents in connection with the elections case: the petitions filed by political parties challenging the results of the latest parliamentary elections and the Court’s decisions and reasoning for initiating the constitutional case. The prosecution office further requested the rules that the experts followed, inter alia in determining which ballots are valid and which are invalid and the criteria under which their work is approbated.

The SCPO requested the rules under which the CEC and the municipal administrations were required to submit the balloting materials, including specimens of the takeover records and of the statements of facts.

The letter also requested the Constitutional Court to name the member or members of the Court or the experts who determined which election stationery would be presented to the experts as a basis for their findings and the letters by which the balloting materials that were required from the CEC and the municipal administrations.

The prosecution service required all takeover records and statements of facts under which the balloting materials had been received. The letter further required reports and transcripts of meetings evidencing the outcome of the experts’ work, whether they were issued any specifications on implementing uniform procedures, why forensic experts were recruited, the rules on their work, and the forensics’ expertise.

Election Commission to Deliver Materials to Prosecution Office

By a letter received on Tuesday, the SCPO requested the CEC to submit sundry documents including CEC’s correspondence with the Constitutional Court in connection with the elections, copies of letters from the Constitutional Court, takeover records, statements of facts on unsealing balloting materials from municipal administrations and takeover records received from the Constitutional Court.

On a proposal by CEC Deputy Chair Rositsa Mateva, the Commission decided to submit the full set of its correspondence with the Constitutional Court related to the task assigned to the CEC by the Court: arrangements for delivery of the balloting materials by the regional administrations to the municipal administrations, as described in the Court’s ruling, information on the letters delivered from the CEC to the municipal and regional administrations, a copy of the takeover records, a copy of the documents whereby the municipal administrations notified the CEC of the opening of the premises where the materials were stored, and a copy of the statements.

Mateva explained that the Commission’s administration has started preparing the documents for submission to the prosecution service which, at this point, comprise some eight folders.

As proposed by the prosecution service, the CEC will send the SCPO the part of the information which is already prepared and will send additionally the rest of the documents when ready.

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On November 26, 2024, the Constitutional Court admitted for consideration on the merits five petitions, submitted by various parties and parliamentary groups, challenging the legitimacy of the early parliamentary elections held on October 27, 2024. The Court ordered a recount of the votes cast by paper ballots and machine-voting ballots in 1,777 voting sections. The expert witnesses were asked to establish whether the valid votes cast matched the entry in the section commission tally sheet and whether the valid machine-voting ballots matched the data in the memory of the machine-voting technical device. The experts were also supposed to establish whether the number of invalid ballots entered in the tally sheets of 442 voting sections corresponds to the number of invalid ballots delivered by section commissions to constituency commissions.

By a ruling dated February 26, 2025, the Constitutional Court tasked the CEC with carrying out a nationwide recalculation of the actual votes cast for the parties and coalitions in the elections. The CEC asked Information Services to enter the relevant data and make the calculations as required by the Court.