Serious disputes broke out between the lawyers in the courtroom during the local elections case in Burgas. Some of them asked for a postponement and accused the experts of not doing their job well. Lawyers of the „Middle European Class“ /MEC/ were adamant that 101 disputed ballots had been submitted to the court and in any case there should be no postponement of the case.
It was initiated on the complaint of Konstantin Bachiyski from MEC and is unprecedented. The lawyers argued that all other reviews of the protocols were irrelevant to the merits of the dispute. Moreover, in case there are ambiguities, they can be resolved in the course of the hearing of the experts and, if necessary, additional tasks can be assigned to them.
In the end, the Administrative Court decided to postpone the hearing of the experts and scheduled the next hearing for December 11 at 10:30 am.
Even before the start of the meeting lawyer Stoyanov, who represents the councilors from GERB, announced that they did not have time to get acquainted with the expertise because it was provided to them yesterday.
„We received the materials late yesterday afternoon, which made it impossible to get acquainted with them. In fact, the volume is large – over 500 pages. The court will judge. Including the complainants and they can have claims regarding the conclusion,“, he pointed out to journalists.
Stoyanov stressed that there is an appeal before the court and it has to decide whether it is justified on the basis of the conclusion and the defence of the parties in the case.
When asked by journalists if there are elements in the expertise that they would dispute, Stoyanov answered:
„There are elements we would dispute. They are purely legal and are related to substantiating the conclusion. Many of the actual ballots were declared invalid and that was at the discretion of the experts. Of the ones that have been separated out as disputed, over 95% are in fact valid.“
Thus it became clear that lawyers of municipal councilors will ask for a postponement of the case today. At the same time, an Iskra.bg reporter reported that this time, unlike the first, there were only three or four municipal councilors at the meeting.
„With absolute certainty, there must be a calculation of mandates. There are disputed ballots that the experts themselves cannot determine whether they are valid or invalid and for which political force the vote was cast. It must be specified for whom they will be and, according to the method provided for in the Electoral Code, the distribution of mandates must be recalculated, so that it is clear what the balance of forces is and whether there is a change in the mandates,“, another lawyer said before the start of the meeting. He added:
„The expertise actually shows quite a few discrepancies in places. There is a change in some of the sectional minutes from what the committees reported from what the experts counted. But in no case can we say at this stage whether this affects the final result. That there are discrepancies is ubiquitous. The rule is that there are such discrepancies, but they do not affect the final result.“
At the same time, in Burgas, a real redistribution of mandates can be reached, because only 34 votes fell short of MEC for one more place in the Municipal Council.
