site.btaOver 15% of Votes for Municipal Councillors Are Invalid, Report Shows

The share of invalid votes for municipal councillors is 15.46%, the Institute for Public Environment Development (IPED) reported on Tuesday, two days after the first round of local elections on October 29.

Following the abolition of machine voting just hours before polling day, voting in Sunday's local elections took place using paper ballots only.

This has again raised the issue of invalid votes witnessed in the local elections and in particular for municipal councillors, the institute said.

What makes a vote invalid

According to the Election Code, a vote is invalid if: the ballot paper does not comply with the established model; the ballot paper does not have two seals of the section election commission on the back; the ballot paper has letters, numbers, etc. written on it; a choice is marked with a symbol other than a tick or an ex, or in ink other than blue; no choice is marked; more than one box for a political entity are ticked; or if the ballot paper contains only a preference.

Where a ballot paper meeting the requirements for validity does not have a sequential number torn off, the vote shall be counted as invalid if that number does not match any of the numbers in the books from which ballot papers were torn off in the section concerned.

What the data shows 

IPED processed the data from the records of the municipal election commissions in the elections of municipal councillors, published on the website of the Central Election Commission (CEC). 

The total number of invalid votes for municipal councillors was 412,701 or 15.46% of the votes. In the previous local elections the invalid votes were 466,077 or 15,09%.

Voters in Sofia Municipality were the most numerous, but only 4.9% of them cast invalid votes.

In the last ten years, such high invalidity rates have only been experienced in the voting for municipal councillors in the local elections of 2015, 2019 and 2023.

This time around, there were again municipalities where 20% or more of the votes cast for municipal councillors were invalid. These are 122 out of all 265 municipalities in the country, the institute said.

The highest share of invalid votes for councillors is in the municipalities of Lukovit with 33.86%, Brusartsi with 31.17% and Dimovo with 30.88%. They are followed by Kotel with 30.4% of invalid votes for municipal councillors, Dolni Dabnik - 28.9%, Sredets - 28.8%, Medkovets and Iskar - 28.7% each, Boychinovtsi - 28.3% and Brezovo - 28.1%.

Some explanations for the invalid votes

IPED believes that the problem with invalid votes might not have existed at all if machine voting had not been cancelled hours before election day by the CEC. Even using them only as printers, the machines do not allow for invalid votes and in this sense there is also no room for doubt in the polling station committees when counting at the end of the day.

Data from the last six campaigns in which voting was done with machines clearly shows the low proportion of invalid votes since 2021 - such ballots were only available in polling stations where voting was done with paper, the institute pointed out.

Several hypothetical reasons for the high share of invalid votes 

The main factor is the CEC's ineffective and late information campaign, which apparently did not reach a wide range of voters. There was not enough serious engagement by the political parties and the electoral actors, who focused more on political agitation. Their campaign in the local elections mainly took place along the lines of voting for mayor without explaining the role and importance of the municipal council, according to IPED.

Another factor, they said, was the weak interest of voters, who did not learn in advance about the type of ballot paper and how to vote.

The competence of the polling station commissions is of great importance as they decide whether a vote is invalid. Whether their members are familiar with the CEC's methodological guidelines and decisions from election day itself, how many of them have received training, what the turnover of people in the polling station committees is: all this also affects the correct counting of votes at the end of election day, IPED said.

According to the institute, yet another significant factor is the reluctance of the CEC to carry out an analysis of the invalid ballots, which they and the CEC Public Council have been advocating for years.