5 new court experts have been appointed in the case for the local elections in Burgas. This was reported by a journalist of Iskra.bg. We remind you that initially their number was 11, but due to differences in their opinion and after some of them announced that they did not support the prepared expertise, Judge Marina Nikolova decided to appoint new ones. The parties to the case had until December 13 to make their proposals.
In the courtroom today, it became clear that due to the large volume of work, the newly elected experts have not been able to prepare their expertise and are unlikely to be able to do so before February 10.
The court granted their request for an extension and extended the deadline until 5:00 p.m. on February 12.
The next hearing in the case, which is unprecedented for the seaside city and was filed on the complaint of Konstantin Bachiyski from „Middle European Class“, will be at 10:30 a.m. on February 16 at the Administrative Court in Burgas.
At the same time, Bachiyski commented to journalists: „I am surprised that the newly appointed persons are currently working at a rather slow pace and are not in a hurry at all. What is more worrying for me is the way they interpret the Electoral Code, because in it, in Article 437, it is explicitly written which ballots are valid and which are not valid, I personally, according to the data of the observers we have in the room during the execution of the census, from their information, see that ballots that are not marked with a “X” or a notch, as it says in the Electoral Code, and are accepted as valid, i.e. purely tendentiously, mostly from one political formation, specifically direct ballots are taken out, which is very worrying for me, we even submitted a request to the court to make a mechanism by which exactly these ballots could be challenged. At GERB, usually – those that were marked as invalid by the leading experts, at the moment, even if there are large deviations, in the sense that they do not comply with the Electoral Code, they are accepted as valid, which is personally very worrying for me. We asked the court to make a mechanism, but the court replied that in all cases the experts have to follow the law. They are legally liable for not complying with the law. As far as I understood from the observers, the experts said about ballots that do not meet the requirements of the law – that people are adults, people do not know and accept them as admissible, but there is no such hypothesis in the law. The law says very clearly which ballots are valid and which are invalid. So they will be the first to look in detail at the activities of these experts.“
