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ACTS Post opinions with a wide range of perspectives to encourage constructive discussion.
Today, the civil Internet initiative “Save Sofia” points out irregularities and possible manipulations during the vote for the distribution of the civil budget within the framework of the “Sofia chooses” program.
“Double the votes for the ‘Sofia Elect’ initiative were manipulated through automated voting for specific projects,” Save Sofia said.
“Sofia chooses” is a program of the municipality of Sofia for the implementation of projects to improve the urban environment, proposed by the citizens and chosen by them by vote. The budget for the program for 2021 is 1,500,000 BGN.
Since ACTS We reached out to “Save Sofia” co-founder Andrey Zografski to discuss the irregularities the initiative points to. Read our conversation in the following lines:
– Mr. Zografski, what is the civil budget?
– The civil budget is a mechanism of direct influence of citizens who pay taxes. With it, they can participate in the distribution of funds. In other words, citizens themselves present the projects they consider significant and then vote for them themselves. This is the practice in many other European cities, and most have civic budgets.
However, the question is how the presentation of the projects and the vote itself are organized, where we have severe criticism of the Sofia City Council.
– What are these criticisms?
– We have created a system to detect these voices. As early as November 10, we found out that fake automatic votes were accumulating for one of the projects. It’s about the Hoof project. We then sent a signal to the Deputy Mayor for Digitization Gencho Kerezov, who removed more than 1,400 false votes for this project. The municipality of Sofia admitted that these votes were falsely generated, which recognized that the system had been violated and that it was possible for someone to cast unregulated votes and thus distort the will of the people of Sofia.
After that, voting continues relatively normally with a normal number of votes, distributed more or less across all projects, especially the few leaders, who still get the most support from the start. This changed dramatically on the last voting day, November 30.When the site was first downloaded and voting was impossible, it was not available 8 hours from that last day. It is impossible to vote between 01:00 at night and 09:20 in the morning. Second, after the site is put back into use, we watch, and our system clearly shows it, concentrated, huge, tens of times more than the previous days of voting for a single project. This continued during the last day, of the remaining 15 hours, when this project garnered over 2,000 votes and replaced the Save Sofia project, which was the first of all time.
By comparison, the 2,000 votes the project received in those 15 hours are the same as those it received in 25 of the previous days. That is, in 25 days the project has gathered 2,000 votes, the same raises in 14-15 hours, which is absolutely impossible for us, especially in the absence of media appearances or promotion. It is absolutely impossible to get almost half of the votes in the last hours of voting, after voting for a whole month.
– Is it the same project, “The Hoof”, or a different one?
– This is the second project at that time. This is a project for school bathrooms. We know the people who fight for this project, the people who presented it. They are urban activists and have spent years fighting to improve the conditions of children, playgrounds, schools. We have absolutely no doubt that they have something to do with this alleged vote rigging. However, we suspect that someone in the municipality or close to the government manipulated the votes to save Ms. Fandakova from the need to implement the “Patriarch Evtimii” project..
At first, he strongly supported the project, even promoted it, but then collapsed, after he did not have enough courage and courage to defend it and actually implement it. That is why we were forced to present this project to the “Sofia Choose” program, precisely to show that it has the support of the people of Sofia. We prove this: the project was consistently the first until the last 4-5 hours of voting, it got the highest number of votes. With this we show Fandakova that the project has the support of the citizens of Sofia.
However, it is unacceptable for the first time to have interference and false 1400 votes; this is a huge number in the context of 20 thousand votes in total, accumulated in the program. It is unacceptable for this to happen once, but it is even more unacceptable for it to happen again on the last voting day. – first to download the site, and then from the first minute to start a concentrated voting, tens of times greater than on any previous day.
We want to take responsibility. We want the deputy mayor for digitization, who is responsible for the program and no other work, to say why he made that system, that it was safely broken once and probably a second time, and for Ms. Fandakova to take responsibility for destroying another Program. which expresses the hope of the citizens of Sofia. We are absolutely disgusted by the fact that they allocate one billion and 700 million levs of budget per year, but they cannot allow 0.1%, that is, 1 million and 500 thousand, to be determined fairly and transparently by the citizens From Sofia. This is the big problem, because through this system, through this vote, all the people of Sofia have clearly seen how the dishonest government works, how the dishonest government works, whose face is Mrs. Fandakova.
Sofia, Bulgaria
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