Electoral law
President Andrzej Duda signed the amendment to the electoral law along with the windmill law, according to presidential minister Małgorzata Paprocka who spoke to PAP.
Last Thursday the Sejm backed the Senate’s resolution not to reject the electoral law amendment, sending the measure to the president’s office. On Tuesday Paprocka told PAP that Duda had signed the amendment.
The amendment to the Electoral Act includes measures to improve access to polling stations for residents of smaller towns. It requires the mayor of a rural or rural urban municipality to provide free passenger transportation in the form of public transport to voters on the electoral roll who vote at a permanent polling station within the municipality if there is no public transport available on election day or if the nearest stop of functioning public transport is more than 1.5 kilometers from the polling station.
Under the new rules a disabled voter with a severe or moderate disability and a voter who will be at least 60 years old by the day of the vote are entitled to free transport from their home to the polling station designated for voting.
One pivotal change concerns the revision and reallocation of existing voting districts. The justification states that the changes will result in about 6,000 new district committees. The PKW site notes that the total number of districts, including foreign ones, exceeded 27.5 thousand in the 2019 parliamentary elections.
The amendment also includes provisions related to the recording of work by constituency election commissions using trustees own recording devices. Previously, under the Electoral Act, shop stewards could record the committee’s activities only up to the moment voting began, verifying the ballot box is empty, the box is closed and sealed, and that the voter lists and the required number of ballots are in place. After that, they could only document the committee’s work from the closing of the polling station to the signing of the protocol.
The amendment now allows steward led recordings from the moment the committee starts its actions through the protocol signing, covering the voting period as well.
The act also establishes the Central Electoral Register, which will be used to determine the number of voters, assemble electoral lists, and prepare lists of individuals entitled to participate in referenda while verifying voting rights.
The Sejm approved the amendment in late January. In late February the Senate adopted a resolution rejecting the amendment. During Senate debates, Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, the rapporteur for the joint Senate committees, noted that constitutional experts had expressed negative views on the amendment and mentioned the practice of legislative silence in the period before elections. The Sejm did not share the Senate’s motion to reject the amendment to the Electoral Act.
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Source: wPolityce