850,000 Bulgarians Not Allowed to Vote in EP Elections - Expert

At least 850,000 Bulgarians listed in the electoral register do not have the right to vote, Professor Petar Ivanov from the Center for Demographic Policy claimed.

"The National Statistical Institute has published data regarding the population of Bulgaria, according to which those who have the right to vote are 6,926,716 people, but CIA's data showed that the number of persons was 5.862 million," Prof. Ivanov told Bulgarian NovaTv.

"According to the Central Election Commission, the people entitled to vote are 6.533 million, meaning that there are some 850,000 'dead souls'," he explained.

Central Election Commission's spokesman Tsvetozar Tomov claimed that the problem was that fewer people are listed in the electoral register now compared to the previous elections.

"This is due to the fact that not all Bulgarians are allowed to vote in the European Parliamentary elections," Tomov said, adding that Bulgarians living in Turkey, for example , do not have the right to vote in the upcoming elections.

"The problem of illegitimate voters has been discussed for 20 years. The main reason for having such a wide gap between the actual number of people living in Bulgaria, and the people who appear in the election lists, is that there is a great number of Bulgarians who are registered as residents of the country, but the Central Election Commission has no information about their address abroad," Tomov said.

According to him, in order to solve this problem, an active voters registration must be introduced.

According to Tomov, there is no threat to the legitimacy of the upcoming elections.