After a series of attempts to change the election rules at its extraordinary meeting today, the Legal Committee adopted a limitation of polling stations outside the EU, and did not accept a 100% control count of machine receipts from the available equipment, reports from novini.bg.
The bill of “Vazrazhdane“ provides for the opening of up to 20 polling stations in countries outside the EU, outside diplomatic and consular missions. Petar Petrov pointed out that in the last parliamentary elections in Canada in 2024, 2,700 people voted in a total of 15 stations, which also included diplomatic missions. We believe that the greatest danger to democracy in our country is the ethnic and dependent vote, so with this bill we want to limit this influence and the controlled vote, the MP emphasized. According to him, every year 5,500 people from Turkey receive Bulgarian citizenship, respectively, the right to vote.
"Majesty" did not have their own person on the committee today, and MECH, PP-DB and APS declared themselves against the restriction of voters' rights.
There was not a single statement from GERB, ITN, BSP or DPS-NN in the committee.
The restrictions on the sections were met with 10 votes "for", 6 "against", and one from MECH abstained.
The bill of "Continuing the Change-Democratic Bulgaria" provides for the restoration of the full capacity, functionality of the existing machines, i.e. to restore the machine protocol, the machines should not be just printers. We propose to count the result by machine - to print a protocol from the machine and a 100% control count of the machine receipts, explained Nadezhda Yordanova. This, according to her, will greatly facilitate the work of the commissions at the end of election day, and the entire process will improve significantly. We insist on the return of the machine protocol, I do so with the awareness that it is being done immediately before the early elections, she added. The request of the DB for the machine protocols did not meet the support of the majority, although "Vazrazhdane" gave it its votes. The request received only 6 "for", 8 were against. The two representatives from the BSP and the one from MECH abstained.
The amendments passed while today President Iliana Yotova is holding another batch of meetings in search of a potential caretaker prime minister. A total of 5 bills passed on first reading a year ago, and after the fall of the government of Rosen Zhelyazkov, the change in the Electoral Code (EC) was again on the agenda. The GERB, ITN, MRF-NN, and BSP majorities were on track to accept new scanning machines, but the socialists split and helped the opposition, including "Vazrazhdane", fail to achieve the quorum at several plenary sessions planning electoral changes.