Voting Changes Risk Skewing Bulgaria Presidential Race

Disappointed Bulgarians who cross the new "I do not support anybody" option on their ballot papers in presidential elections on November 6, may end up inadvertently assisting the strongest candidate, experts have warned.

Changes to the electoral code, pushed through by the government this spring, introduced mandatory voting but also left voters the option of not choosing any candidates.

The so-called "protest votes" will count as valid and be calculated, but, at the same, according to the electoral law, may not be taken into account in determining the winner.

"In theory, excluding those votes from the results could help elect a new president in the first round of the vote," Antoaneta Tsoneva, an electoral expert, told BIRN on Wednesday.

Bulgaria's constitution states that a president can be elected in the first round only if  a candidate wins over 50 per cent of the votes and if the total turnout exceeds 50 per cent.

But if many voters select the option of supporting nobody, their votes will be automatically extracted from the total, meaning that the next president then wins with a smaller percentage of votes than the constitution requires.

"If we cross this option, we are certainly helping the leading candidate," Professor Mihail Konstantinov, a former member of the Central Electoral Commission, said on Thursday.

According to the latest polls, Tsetska Tsacheva, candidate of Bulgaria's biggest party, the center-right GERB of prime minister Boyko Borissov, is leading the race.

She is followed by Rumen Radev, a former airforce chief nominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party.

The idea of introducing the "not supporting anyone" option came from the head of parliament's legal commission, Daniel Kirilov, who comes...