site.btaCentral Election Commission Announces Names of MPs in 43rd National Assembly

119 POLITICS - CENTRAL ELECTION COMMISSION - MPs - NAMES

Central Election Commission Announces
Names of MPs in
43rd National Assembly


Sofia, October 10 (BTA) - The Central Election Commission (CEC)
Friday announced the names of the MPs in the 43nd National
Assembly according to the election constituencies and candidate
lists from the October 5 early general elections. CEC
Chairperson Ivelina Alexieva said that the names are available
on the Commission's website and will be published by BTA [as
part of the CEC Decisions emission, which can be accessed free
of charge on BTA's website].

The names of 20 MPs are featured on two lists of the
corresponding parties and they will have to choose which
constituency they are going to represent in Parliament within
two days from the publication of the names by CEC. If they do
not meet this deadline, CEC will set the MPs as representatives
of the election constituency in the candidate list of which they
were registered first.

A total of ten MPs refused to be announced as elected.

CEC Spokesperson Kamelia Neykova said that the Commission has
received six complaints from MP candidates who run in the
elections, some demanding that the ballot papers be recounted
and others disputing the district election commissions'
protocols. The complaints, however, will remain unaddressed
because, in accordance with the Election Code, CEC does not have
the right to consider these.

CEC Spokesperson Tsvetozar Tomov explained the methodology for
determining the results and for re-distribution of votes. At
these elections it has lead to certain anomalies, the most
striking one being the election of Movement for Rights and
Freedoms (MRF) candidate Alexander Metodiev as MP only with 864
votes.

According to the Hare/Niemeyer formula, the seats to be
allocated to a party are calculated in two steps: first the
number of second votes obtained by a party is multiplied by the
total number of seats to be distributed and divided by the total
number of all second votes to be considered. In a second step,
the result is split up into the integral share and the residual.
The integral shares are allocated to the parties in the form of
seats. The remaining seats are allocated to the parties in the
order of size of the residuals.

Tomov explained that the anomaly with Metodiev's election has
been caused by the strongly expressed imbalanced distribution of
the population in the separate regions of the country. The
second reason has been the adding of the votes obtained abroad
as they are not included in the regional distribution. This,
Tomov says, has allowed "distortion of the procedure" and
returning of candidates to Parliament on a very low number of
votes.

According to Tomov, there is a higher risk of the emergence of
anomalies in smaller regions. The fact that in the specific case
it is related to MRF is due to the higher number of votes this
party gets in sections abroad.

The high number of invalid ballot papers - over 200,000 at these
elections - is mostly due to the blank ballot papers and the
fact that certain people have marked more than one political
force, Kamelia Neikova commented. This compares to around 90,000
invalid ballot papers in the 2013 parliamentary elections. The
fact that their number has more than doubled is alarming.

***

In the meantime MRF has issued a declaration in connection with
the protests against the election of certain candidates on a
comparatively small number of votes in Kyustendil, Gabrovo and
Yambol. MRF recalls that this phenomenon is not related only to
the Movement. It is due to the use of the Hare/Niemeyer formula,
incorporated in the Election Code after a decision of the
National Assembly. The Election Code has been drafted by GERB
(in particular, its former MP Iskra Fidossova). The Code
provisions were "further developed and affirmed" by the
Bulgarian Socialist Party (former Parliament Deputy Chair Maya
Manolova) in the 42nd National Assembly, MRF recalls in the
declaration. /LI/DS, TK/