Voting

BELGRADE - The polling stations for the Belgrade local elections closed at 8 pm on Sunday.

Only those voters who were still at the polling stations at the time of the closure were allowed to vote.

Ahead of the elections in the Serbian capital scheduled for March 4, Serbia's outdated voting system has one advantage: it is immune from potential hack attacks, experts say.

"The most susceptible system to hacking is the e-voting system, which Serbia doesn't have and will not have any time soon," Bojan Klacar, from the Center for Free Elections and Democracy, CeSid, told BIRN.

Bulgaria’s ruling coalition has survived a no-confidence vote called by the opposition, which accused the government of failing to deal with widespread corruption.

The simulation of electronic distance voting should not be just an imitation. Ombudsman Maya Manolova wrote to the Central Electoral Commission.

According to her, simulation should be done in a real election area and among real voters.

The Central Electoral Commission will publicly test the remote electronic vote. The Electoral Law obliges the CEC to conduct 3 simulations by the end of this year.

The envisaged simulations are for the election of MEPs, MPs and municipal mayors. They will include members of the CEC, journalists, representatives of various institutions and non-governmental organizations.

The Catalan parliament on Friday afternoon declared the region's independence from Spain.

Members of this parliament decided in a secret ballot - boycotted by the opposition.

Establishing and introducing electronic voting by 2019 for all types of elections is the project of the State Agency for Electronic Governance, co-financed by the European Social Fund. The estimated cost for realization is BGN 1.5 million.

The Catalan government has announced that 90.9 percent of citizens who voted in Sunday's referendum on independence circled the option "yes."

The referendum, which is not recognized by Madrid, was marked by unrest.

Catalonia residents have begun to gather in front of the voting venues for the Sunday Independence Referendum, according to Reuters.

The vote was declared unconstitutional by the Madrid Supreme Court, but the regional authorities have expressed readiness to do so, despite all the government's efforts to prevent it.

Catalan residents have started casting ballots under the referendum on the region's independence from Spain with polling stations having opened at 9:00 a.m. local time (07:00 GMT), a Sputnik correspondent reported on Sunday.