Today’s papers give wide coverage to the decision by the Central Election Commission (CEC) to scrap machine voting as an option to paper ballots at the upcoming general election on 26 March.

Sega newspaper carries a headline: “CEC scraps machine voting definitively”. There will be no machine voting at the upcoming elections. This became clear after the CEC eliminated the only company bidding for the public tender for voting machines – Lirex BG. The reason is that the company is unable to provide the machines by 10 March, as the public contract offer stipulates, Sega writes further.

Capital writes that the public procurement offer for providing or hiring 12,500 voting machines – one for each polling station, complete with the software necessary - was made on 14 February. Only one company applied but its offer proved unacceptable. Lirex has very good software but the company is not in a capacity to guarantee that it will deliver the machines at polling stations abroad within a reasonable period of time, i.e. by 10 March, Capital adds.

According to Trud newspaper, Lirex wanted to sell, not lease the voting machines. If it was a question of selling, the bidding company would have relied on delivering the machines in batches, with some of them (around one third) being delivered for the elections, and the other two-thirds – over a given period after the elections, Trud writes further.

“Elections will not be annulled over machines,” reads a headline carried by Standart newspaper. The paper quotes Central Election Commission spokesman Tsvetozar Tomov as saying that there are no serious grounds for the annulment of the election results over the absence of voting machines as an alternative. Constitutionalists agree, saying that what matters is that each voter is given an opportunity to cast his or her vote, whether by paper ballot or voting machine. Standart goes on to quote ombudsman Maya Manolova that the Central Election Commission is setting a bad example and tone that laws do not have to be respected. In Maya Manolova’s words, the elections may be referred to the Constitutional Court.

Compiled by Atanas Tsenov

English version: Milena Daynova