A voter whose machine receipt comes out blank, short or torn cannot cast another ballot in the presidential election, Central Election Commission (CEC) spokeswoman Stoyanka Balova told BNT. Under changes to the election code, the result at each polling station now comes from the report the machine itself generates.
If the machine gets as far as printing "Thank you," the vote is already saved on the memory stick and goes into the final count, even if the receipt is blank or short, Balova explained. Blank, incomplete and torn receipts caused problems at the last few votes. Besides the machine's own report, polling station commissions will now also draw up a second one, counting the control receipts, to make the process more transparent. "We decided there should be another report, in which polling station election commissions count the control receipts," Balova told BNT.
The second change applies when a machine breaks down: in that case, it's the polling station commission, not the regional one, that decides whether to switch to paper ballots. The CEC is covering these topics in training for regional election commissions - the first such session in seven years - 18 days before the presidential election.
Ekaterina Klechkova-Dimitrova sits on Regional Election Commission No. 26 for the Sofia region. She pointed out that when a receipt is incomplete, the voter has no way of knowing how their vote was recorded. The polling station commission will have to explain to them that they cannot vote again. If a technician is delayed, the commission will decide on its own how to proceed and will only tell the regional commission afterwards, along with the reports. She said this worries her because of the particular polling stations in the Sofia region.
Innovation and digital transformation minister Ivan Vasilev said the new technology replaces an expensive, complicated procedure with a quick, cheap one. He said the transparency of the process will stop attempts to cast doubt on the vote. "Bulgarian citizens decide who the next president of Bulgaria will be," he told BNT.
The CEC has randomly drawn the numbers of 10 machines that must be checked and certified before election day. A third of the machines that were in the worst technical condition have already been fixed, and repairs are continuing.