Authorities, Opposition Clash over Number of Bulgarians Erroneously Barred from Voting

Several days after the October 23 local and presidential elections in Bulgaria, allegations still linger that an unspecified number of Bulgarians have been deprived of their right to vote due to inconsistencies in the databases of Directorate General of Civil Registration and Administrative Service (GRAO) and the Interior Ministry.

On Wednesday authorities confessed that a total of 12 000 eligible voters had been erroneously taken off electoral rolls over their failure to meet residency requirements.

The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), however, insisted that the number of people barred from voting without good reason was much higher and amounted to at least 400 000, Sega daily reported.

Iskra Fidosova, MP from the ruling center-right party GERB and Chair of the Parliamentary Legal Committee said Thursday that she was not worried by the numbers cited because they represented a small fraction of the total of 7 million voters.

An exact estimation of the damage caused by the miscommunicated data was not given because Regional Development Minister Lilyana Pavlova, who is in charge of GRAO, declared that information concerning a total of 11 000 of the removed entries had been corrected shortly ahead of election day.

No conclusive feedback was given about whether the people erroneously taken off electoral rolls had had the chance to exercise their voting rights.

GRAO head Ivan Getov sided with the claims of the ruling party, saying that the problem involved only a small percentage of eligible voters.

BSP presidential candidate Ivaylo Kalfin asked how the Interior Ministry had obtained data about the movement of citizens within the EU territory where they could travel with an ID card and no special passport or visa information had to be submitted.

He urged the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) to do whatever was necessary to allow these people to vote at the runoff of the presidential elections.

The proposal is hardly likely to be of any consequence because the deadline for removing commissions or correcting mistakes in voter lists expired on October 15.