“There is no way to distinguish intent from illiteracy. We only monitor what is recorded in the protocol, does it correspond to what was found in the respective bag“.
This was said in an interview for the program “120 Minutes“ by Alexander Andreev, former chairman of the Central Election Commission and expert in the latest case of the Constitutional Court, which ended this week.
On March 13, the Constitutional Court issued a decision on the case and declared the election of 16 members of parliament illegal. This is the largest partial cancellation of a parliamentary vote so far.
As a result of this decision, the Central Election Commission announced (CEC) that with 107 votes the party "Veličie" crosses the threshold of parliament and will have 10 of its own members of parliament.
With that, there will be fewer deputies from other parliamentary groups. There are also shifts within the parliamentary groups themselves – six will leave and new deputies will come in their place.
The subject of the Constitutional Court's inspection were the ballot papers of 2,204 polling stations, which represents 17.06% of the total 12,920 polling stations in the elections on October 27, 2024.
The experts checked the ballot papers of 1,768 polling stations and found that in 46.75% of the stations there was a change in the number of actual votes.
When asked why only 2,200 stations out of all over 12,000 were checked, Andreev replied: “The Constitutional Court's reasoning states that checking all stations would take too long and would not lead to speed in the voting“.