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Five judges expressed dissenting opinions
Bulgaria's Constitutional Court on Friday issued a decision determining that all-machine voting is not unconstitutional. The decision has been posted on the Court's website. The case was instituted on May 7, 2021 on a petition by 66 MPs of GERB in the 45th National Assembly, BTA reports.
The GERB petition challenged provisions of an Act to Amend and Supplement the Election Code. Passed conclusively on April 29 and entered into force on May 1, the revisions in question scrapped voting by paper ballot and replaced it by machine voting only with minor exceptions, required the replacement of the incumbent Central Election Commission (CEC), and limited the application of the proportional representation system until the next regular parliamentary elections.
The Court ruled that the machine voting ballot essentially only displays the paper ballot content on an electronic medium and that the principle of equal franchise is not breached because a vote cast by machine carries the same weight as a vote cast by paper ballot.
The Constitutional Court rejected the claimed unconstitutionality of the provision on voting by paper ballot in sections with fewer than 300 voters and of another amendment, under which the President of the Republic had 14 days from the entry into force of the Act to appoint new CEC members, whereupon the credentials of the sitting members were to be terminated.
The Court found that voting by paper ballot in under-300 voter sections is completely admissible when based on objective and legally established criteria, and that this method is similarly provided for mobile sections, at hospitals, nursing homes and other specialized care homes, and on board ships flying the Bulgarian flag.
The Court, however, decided that limiting the applicability of the proportional representation system until the conduct of the first regular parliamentary elections after the entry into force of the amendments at issue is unconstitutional. "The provision is addressed to a next National Assembly, prescribing to it to adopt, within an indefinite timeframe, new rules on the conduct of parliamentary elections according to an unspecified election system other than proportional representation. The provision is unclear, contradictory and impracticable and, therefore, it runs counter to the principle of the rule of law proclaimed in Article 4 (1) of the Constitution. It targets the abolition of the existing proportional representation system without specifying a system that should be implemented so that the conduct of parliamentary elections could be at all possible," the Decision reads.
The Decision was not adopted unanimously by the 12-member Constitutional Court. Five judges (Anastas Anastasov, Grozdan Iliev, Mariana Karagyozova, Tanya Raykovska and Filip Dimitrov) expressed dissenting opinions about the constitutionality of machine voting only and about voting by paper ballot as an exception. Three judges (Pavlina Panova, Krassimir Vlahov and Anastas Anastasaov) disagreed with the unavailability of machine voting in sections with fewer than 300 voters.
