Home > 1.3.2.2 Voting procedures > Report on Electoral Law and Electoral Administration in Europe
 
 
 
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Since the early 1990s, parts of Belgium have installed touchscreen voting machines in polling stations, with almost half of the electorate using them in the federal elections of 2019. As recommended by OSCE/ODIHR, they were equipped with voter-verified paper audit trails. Voters can, thus, check whether their votes have been recorded by the voting machine correctly before inserting the printout into an electronic ballot box which counts the votes. France has applied EVM in some municipalities, but, according to ODIHR, there is a moratorium on further expanding the use of the machines. Bulgaria has piloted EVM in a number of elections since 2014. However, since it was not possible to provide EVM for all polling stations (as ruled by the Supreme Administrative Court), no EVM at all were used in the 2017 parliamentary elections. In Germany, the pilot use of EVM was suspended on the basis of a Federal Constitutional Court decision in 2009, and the Netherlands returned to voting with ballot papers only in 2008. E-counting in national elections is applied, for instance, in the Russian Federation, where a considerable number of polling stations are equipped with ballot scanners.