Southern Bulgarian Village May Hold Re-Vote over Ballots Hidden in Drawer

The results of Sunday's elections held in the southern Bulgarian village of Voivodovo may be canceled after 50 ballots were found hidden in a drawer at the premises of the sectional electoral commission.

At the first round of Bulgaria's local and presidential elections, Ilyamai Beva from the ethnic Turkish party Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) won the mayoral race by 2 votes, state-owned TV channel BNT reported on Thursday.

The hidden ballots were found by Ayvaz Ismail who told journalists he had been looking for a sheet of paper to keep score of card games.

Private TV channel bTV reported that the abandoned ballots had been unearthed by two card players who had been searching for stray paper to use as a score card and to keep the stove burning.

The two had acted as an observer and a party-affiliated observer at the October 23.

The head of the pensioners club which had been turned into a polling station said that the two men had been throwing ballots into the stove.

The men, however, rejected the allegations.

"The fault in this case lies with the sectional electoral commission because it is under obligation to package and store all election materials," said Veselina Tencheva, Chair of the municipal electoral commission.

She confirmed that a total of 50 ballots had been found, some of them invalid, some empty but with stamps on them, and a valid one for the mayoral candidate who failed to make it to a runoff.

When asked to account for the situation, the sectional electoral commission explained that they had forgotten to take the ballots amid all the chaos surrounding the packaging.

Zoya Mironova, mayoral candidate of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), was adamant that she would file a complaint with the Supreme Administrative Court (VAS) seeking a cancellation.

Ilyami Beva, however, insisted that there were no reasons for that and claimed that the "hidden" ballots had been deliberately inserted into the drawer.

"I accuse them because they are spinning intrigues and they cannot work honestly. I won honestly," the winner of the mayoral race said.

A police investigation is underway into the case and witnesses are being questioned by an investigating officer.