Head of Sofia municipal election commission resigns at request of Borissov
At the end of a week that saw chaos and the marathon detention of people involved in ballot-processing in Sofia, the head of Sofia’s Municipal Election Commission, Dilyana Ivanova, resigned at the request of Prime Minister and GERB party leader Boiko Borissov.
Ivanova submitted her resignation on October 30 immediately after it was requested by Borissov, GERB said in a statement. Ivanova had been appointed to the post from the commission quota of GERB.
Borissov called for her resignation because of the public tensions around the receipt and processing of election result protocols from district election commissions at the Arena Armeec stadium in Sofia.
The GERB leader asked for her resignation so as not to compromise or prevent the transmission of reports to the Central Election Commission about the first round of voting in Bulgaria’s October 25 2015 mayoral and municipal elections.
GERB said that Ivanova was resigned both as head of the commission and as a member. The party said that her resignation would be submitted to the Central Election Commission “in minutes”.
The party said that a replacement as head was being nominated, lawyer Polina Vitanova, a member of the Municipal Election Commission.
Earlier, it emerged that 119 people who were held for two days at Arena Armeec during the ballot-processing had lodged a complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office that they had been illegally detained.
Should the Prosecutor’s Office not help them, they would approach the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
As the saga unfolded, the Central Election Commission said that it would pay additional fees to those who had been held up at Arena Armeec.
GERB and the Reformist Bloc earlier this week said that the entire Central Election Commission should resign over the debacle at the ballot-processing centre in Sofia. There also have been political recriminations about the law that made the chaos possible, drafted at the time of the now-departed 2013/14 ruling axis of the Bulgarian Socialist Party and Movement for Rights and Freedoms, and piloted by then-BSP MP and now-Ombudsman, Maya Manolova.
