Bulgaria’s “Paper Coalition” and the Politics of Distrust in Voting Machines

 

In a new article published in the Swiss Political Science Review, political scientist Petar Bankov dissects one of Bulgaria’s most heated political debates of recent years: the fight over electronic voting machines. His analysis makes a striking claim—resistance to voting technology in Bulgaria was less about technical flaws and more about politics, identity, and power.

Bulgaria first introduced electronic voting machines to reduce the country’s chronic problems of spoiled ballots, vote-buying, and administrative chaos. Observers, including the OSCE, noted clear benefits: far fewer invalid votes, faster and more accurate preferential vote counting, and stronger safeguards against the kind of clientelism that had long plagued Bulgarian elections. For reform-minded parties—especially We Continue the Change (PP) and Democratic Bulgaria (DB)—machine voting, as they call the process of using electronic voting machines, was a symbol of modernization and part of a broader digitalization agenda that included efforts to build an Estonian-style e-government.

But these benefits came with political costs for some of the country’s older, more established parties. Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS)—long dominant players with deep offline networks—saw their ability to mobilize voters and exercise influence shrink.

Their base was less digitally savvy, and their campaign methods relied heavily on offline structures, local patronage, and in some cases practices that electronic voting made harder to sustain.

In late 2022, GERB, BSP, and DPS came together to reintroduce paper ballots alongside machines, forming what their opponents quickly branded the “paper coalition.” Reformist members of parliament mocked the alliance as clinging to paper like a lifeline, while commentators noted how the phrase instantly resonated with the public. The label highlighted what was really at stake: not the technical merits of voting machines, but the survival strategies of parties tied to the old political order.

Political scientist Bankov shows how the “paper coalition” justified its position with stories about distrust and disenfranchisement. BSP argued that machine voting discouraged elderly voters from participating. GERB and DPS suggested that the technology was vulnerable and unsafe, despite the lack of evidence. These claims—often misleading, sometimes outright disinformation—were repeated in parliament, in press conferences, and across sympathetic media.

The irony, as Bankov notes, is that these arguments ignored the evidence. Surveys showed most Bulgarians supported machine voting. Statistics confirmed that invalid ballots had plummeted when machines were used exclusively. Even BSP’s claims about alienated older voters rang hollow, since many were already adept with ATMs and messaging apps. Yet the paper coalition succeeded. By December 2022, the Bulgarian parliament had passed reforms that drastically reduced the role of electronic voting, limiting the machines to producing paper slips that then had to be counted manually, eliminating their key advantages for accuracy and security.

What does this episode tell us? According to Bankov, the fight over voting machines in Bulgaria was never a purely technical debate about electoral efficiency. It was a battle over political identity and survival. Parties with little digital presence and offline mobilization strategies resisted a reform that undercut their traditional advantages. To do so, they deployed narratives—anchored in distrust, conspiracy, and nostalgia—that overshadowed empirical evidence of the machines’ benefits.

In short, Bulgaria’s “paper coalition” shows how electoral modernization can be trumped not by technology’s limits, but by political calculation. When digital reforms threaten entrenched interests, disinformation and fear can be powerful tools to roll them back—even at the expense of a fairer and more reliable vote.

Philippines’ Election Tech Woes Spark Concern

 

The Philippines, long regarded as a regional pioneer in election modernization, is now in the midst of a crisis that threatens to unravel years of progress. The 2025 national elections—plagued by widespread technical failures—have cast a shadow over the country’s hard-earned reputation.

The breakdown began at the very start of election day, when President Bongbong Marcos himself struggled to cast his vote as the automated counting machine repeatedly failed to scan his ballot. This scenario—machines rejecting ballots, malfunctioning printers, and stalled voting lines—was not an isolated case. As widely reported, similar incidents unfolded in thousands of precincts nationwide.

Local election watchdogs like LENTE and the PPCRV warned that the problems were not merely technical hiccups but signs of deeper systemic failures. Overvoting occurred on a large scale due to low-quality paper ballots and substandard pens that caused ink to bleed and marks to be misread. Many voters also reported discrepancies between their selections and the printed voter receipts (VVPATs).

As voting ended and vote-counting machines began transmitting results, media tech teams discovered that thousands of vote transmissions had been duplicated—corresponding to nearly five million votes. COMELEC later claimed it had corrected the issue in the early hours of the morning, but the lack of transparency around the fix only deepened public distrust.

The magnitude of these glitches is difficult to overstate. They have cast a dark cloud over the credibility of the electoral process and triggered widespread public outcry. What’s worse, this is not the first time Miru Systems—the technology provider responsible for this year’s infrastructure—has been implicated in election failures. In Iraq’s 2018 parliamentary elections, Miru’s technology failed so catastrophically that the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) was forced to mandate a full nationwide recount. Today, echoes of that episode are reverberating in the Philippines, where some public officials, civil society organizations, and voters alike are starting to demand a similar audit.

Filipinos waited for hours under the punishing heat, queuing with hope and conviction that their vote would count. That trust now hangs in the balance. A transparent manual recount—as already requested by the PPCRV—is essential not only to confirm who truly won and lost, but also to begin restoring public faith in the democratic process. In parallel, election data must be made fully accessible to independent auditors.

The Philippines stands at a crossroads. The world is watching. These elections can still be redeemed—not through spin or silence, but through truth, transparency, and accountability. Without that, the country’s proud legacy of electoral innovation may be lost. But with courage and reform, it can emerge stronger—and once again lead by example.