In response, Rositsa Mateva stated, in an interview with bTV, that all municipal election commissions have to obey the CEC’s decision, and that there will be no machine voting in the country. She said she did not understand how the municipal election commission-Sofia made the decision for a machine vote, as, in her words, the CEC had not given permission for the voting machines to leave the warehouse, something the prime minister refuted during today’s briefing.

• Central Election Commission decides voting at tomorrow's local election will be by paper ballots only
  
• PP/DB appeal Central Election Commission’s decision to do away with machine vote at Supreme Administrative Court
  

PM Denkov stated that at the previous local election there were more than 600,000 paper ballots which were declared invalid. The Central Election Commission decision is based on a report by the State Agency for National Security (SANS), and it was made before the expiry of the deadline for the certification of the voting machines, PM Denkov said. The Bulgarian prime minister stated further that the SANS report was manipulatively written, and that is why it is not going to be posted on the Council of Ministers’ website, as he has been urged.

• Protests against the abolition of machine voting in Sofia and Varna
  

Earlier today, Central Election Commission (CEC) spokesperson Rositsa Mateva said that the information from the report of the State Agency for National Security (SANS), which has been made public, about the filming of the hash code is misleading, as the public code is presented to all commissions. She stated that the report includes information about acts committed on 25 October outside of all procedures and rules, and that the SANS report was very disturbing. That is why the CEC is not going to revoke its decision for a paper-ballot-only vote tomorrow, she said.

Contrary to the decision of the Central Election Commission, the Municipal Election Commission-Sofia is of the opinion that the CEC’s considerations in making that decision are unclear, and that in practice it is tantamount to lack of motives which constitutes a violation of the procedural rules, and also that the ban on machine voting does not have a binding effect. In response, Rositsa Mateva stated, in an interview with bTV, that all municipal election commissions have to obey the CEC’s decision, and that there will be no machine voting in the country. She said she did not understand how the Municipal Election Commission-Sofia made the decision for a machine vote, as, in her words, the CEC had not given permission for the voting machines to leave the warehouse, something the prime minister refuted during today’s briefing, saying that “the Central Election Commission deceived the public when it said the machines had left the warehouses without orders from them”.

Nikola Minchev from We Continue the Change (PP) on his part urged the municipal election commission and the Interior Ministry to not be in a hurry to return the voting machines to Sofia, but to wait until the end of the day for more clarity.

In a televised interview, Interior Ministry Secretary General Zhivko Kotsev stated that the Interior Ministry would abide by the law and would assume the security of all polling stations.