site.btaThere Is Such a People Floor Leader Warns of Repeat of Election Irregularities

Speaking to reporters in Parliament on Friday, There Is Such a People (TISP) Floor Leader Toshko Yordanov said his party had done everything possible to ensure fair elections and had never been accused of forging protocols or engaging in other electoral violations.

According to Yordanov, the lack of quorum in the plenary hall, engineered through procedural maneuvers, prevented amendments to the Election Code from being adopted. As a result, he said, the next elections would likely see a repeat of what happened in the last vote at election commissions: destruction of ballots, rewriting of protocols, and suspicions of manipulation involving the existing voting machines.

Yordanov also said that a year or so ago, Continue the Change had proposed the same bill introducing voting with scanning machines, but had since reversed their position. He added that at the start of the current parliament, TISP had asked Continue the Change to sign a declaration committing to the removal of so-called “dead souls” from electoral registers. While the declaration was signed, he noted, their representatives later voted against cleaning the electoral registers, attending the parliamentary legal affairs committee’s meeting. Yordanov presented a copy of the declaration and cited its contents.

The phrase “dead souls” refers to a form of electoral fraud where the names of deceased people, or people who do not exist, are kept on electoral registers to be used to cast fraudulent votes.