Today’s papers give extensive coverage to the issue of machine voting at the early parliamentary elections due on 26 Match, parallel with the voting by paper ballot. Less than two months before the elections the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the Central Election Commission must provide voting machines for all polling stations, and not just for 500 as was the commission’s decision previously.

“The voting machines are brought in from the Philippines by ship,” reads a headline in Trud newspaper. The paper specifies that the large number of machines that will be hired – 13,000 for all polling stations – would make it impossible to fly them in by plane. There are no calculations yet as to how much transportation will cost. The paper adds that the Philippines are the most probable supplier, as it has 90,000 voting machines which are state-owned. The public procurement procedure for voting machines will be launched on 8 February with a deadline on 15 February, Trud writes.

“The money’s there, the time and the machines are not,” writes Standard on its part. The paper carries an interview with election expert Dimitar Dimitrov who says that even if voting machines were to be provided, perforce, in every single polling station on 26 March, it would be better if they weren’t. The expert adds that if they are provided, a great many compromises would have to be made which may later trigger dramatic events, and that includes calling into question the legitimacy of the election process.

In an interview for 24 Chassa, Daniel Vulchev from the Reformist Bloc says that machine voting is one of the most important changes in the electoral legislation because paper ballots are a source of many ways to rig elections. In his words, however, there probably exist technical issues that are very complex and a campaign must be launched to show people how to vote using a machine. The commissions at polling stations have to be trained themselves. Daniel Vulchev adds that if there is even the slightest possibility of applying this now, it has to be done whatever the cost. But if it is a technical impossibility, that would put us in an absurd position – we would have to break the law because it would be impossible to comply with it, he says.

The weekly Economist carries a commentary entitled “The folly of machine voting”. “What is the point of having machine voting, seeing as the commissions copy the results by hand and fill in the protocol by hand?!” the paper asks.

“Fatal delay in preparations for EU presidency,” writes Sega. The last-minute public procurement tenders may mean overshooting the 150 million Leva mark, set down for the purpose many times over. This country is still following the old preparation plan drafted before Brexit, the paper adds.

For the first time since 1990, the number of weddings in the country is up, Trud writes, with 30 percent more marriages registered over the past 4 years. The negative tendency from the 2012 – 2015 period has been broken, the National Statistical Institute says.

Compiled by Atanas Tsenov

English version: Milena Daynova