On Sunday, Bulgarians elect mayors of 91 municipalities, 491 town halls and 31 districts. In 5900 voting sections in the country, voting will also be done by machines. This was decided by the Supreme Administrative Court, which cancelled the decision of the Central Election Commission (CEC) from the first round. The decision of the CEC at the last moment to vote only with paper ballots was reached after a report by the StateAgency for National Security (SANS), from which it became clear that the Deputy Minister of e-Government Mihail Stoynov downloaded the codes of the machines, saved them on his phone and on a flash drive. The Deputy Minister, for his part, stated that the SANS report is full of false statements. The video recording is a mandatory part of the procedure after the certification of the machines, Stoynov also stated.
On November 2 the Ministry of e-Government (MeG), the Bulgarian Institute of Metrology (BIM) and the Bulgarian Institute for Standardization (BIS) certified the compliance of the technical devices for machine voting, which will be used for the runoff in the local elections on November 5. The teams of the three institutions worked intensively and continuously in the last days, in order to carry out the procedure and ensure the conduct of fair and democratic elections on Sunday.
Traditionally, pre-election campaigning is not allowed on the day of reflection. According to the Electoral Code, it is not permitted to publish data from sociological surveys, public opinion polls, and exit polls on the results and voters' preferences for supporting a certain party or coalition until the end of election day. The ban also applies to profiles on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Viber, YouTube, and media service providers.
6,380,052 voters have the right to vote in the runoff. On November 5, those voters who gained electoral rights between the first and second rounds, including those who turn 18, can vote and are included in the electoral rolls.
On Sunday, the voting sections will open at 7:00 a.m. and voting will continue until 8:00 p.m., or until the number of people waiting to vote runs out. /BGNES
