This decision was made on the basis of the first part of Article 1 and Article 4 of the Municipal Council Election Law. The mentioned norms of the law stipulate that municipal councils are elected in equal, direct, secret and proportional elections for four years. The council’s regular elections are held on the first Saturday of June.
With these municipal elections, a completely new design of ballot papers will be introduced. The visual appearance of the ballots will be changed, as well as the conditions for filling them in, and they will no longer be crossed out.
The main changes will affect those voters who want to single out one of the candidates, or express a negative attitude towards one of the candidates in the selected list. Until now, it was customary that the candidates that the particular voter particularly supports could be marked with a “+” sign, and those that were undesirable could be crossed out. According to the new model of the ballot paper, next to the name of each candidate, there will be two fields of different colors, and the voter will be able to cover one – the green field, if he particularly supports a candidate, or the other – the red field, if he finds the particular candidate unacceptable.
Instructions for filling out the new ballots will be available at each polling station, in each polling compartment. Such a change of the ballot paper model is said to be necessary to ensure automatic counting of votes in future elections, as well as popular voting. Respectively, the same type of ballots will be used both in the municipal elections of June 7, in the 2026 Saeima elections, and also in the European Parliament elections, which will be held in 2029.
To ensure elections, each polling station will be provided with a scanner, and the purchased equipment will be handed over to municipalities.
Municipalities will also have the opportunity to organize remote polling stations in order to get as close as possible to the voters, as well as to organize the division of polling stations, i.e. by providing the work of one polling station at two different addresses of the same municipality.
The law stipulates that the State Digital Development Agency provides the technological solution in accordance with this law and the instructions of the Central Election Commission on the processes, functions, tasks and objectives for the organization of council elections. On the other hand, the Directorate of Citizenship and Migration Affairs, the State Revenue Service, the Judicial Administration, the Information Center of the Ministry of the Interior and the Center for Documenting the Consequences of Totalitarianism provide online all the necessary data to ensure the operation of the technological solution under the control of the State Digital Development Agency.
It has already been reported that lists of candidates for the upcoming municipal elections can be submitted from March 19 to April 8.
On the last day of submission of lists, they may be submitted to the election commission of the relevant municipality, both in person and remotely, until 6 p.m.
For the submission of the list, a security deposit of 15 euros will have to be paid for each deputy to be elected, regardless of the number of candidates included in the list. This money will go to the special deposit account of the council’s election commission.
Along with other documents, a pre-election program signed by all candidates included in the list, the volume of which cannot exceed 4000 visible stamps, will have to be submitted.
Acceptance and verification of candidate lists will be organized by the chairman or secretary of the specific election commission. The list of candidates submitted remotely and the documents attached to it will be checked within one day of their receipt, while those submitted in person will be checked at the time of their submission.
After the end of acceptance of the lists of candidates, the election commission will hold a lottery of list numbers, which will be held at an open meeting of the election commission.