Bulgaria Election Body Ignores Questions About EU Elections

Reports of unusual concentrations of preferential votes for unlikely candidates in smaller settlements emerged soon after the election.

An open data extraction tool produced by the Bivol investigative website, which shows where each candidate won their preferential votes, facilitated the journalists' work.

Most of the unusual voting patterns benefited candidates of the ruling GERB party of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov and the nominally liberal and opposition ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms, MRF.

One such beneficiary was acting GERB MEP Emil Radev, who stood for re-election in eighth position on the GERB list.

Radev won no less than 221 preferential votes out of 221 votes cast in total for GERB in one polling station in the small southeastern town of Lyubimets.

In the whole town, Radev won 1,116 preferential votes out of 2,768 votes cast for his party in total.

Asked by bTV media outlet how he explained his landslide victory in this small town, Radev insisted it was down to "the quality campaign" he did in the region.

In fact, the closest he came to Lyubimets during the month-long campaign was Dimitrovgrad, 55 kilometers away, and he was only there once.

A search through his social media feed showed that his tours were mostly concentrated in the north and northeast of the country.

In Varna, the third biggest city in Bulgaria, where he attended at least five events in May, Radev won 1,747 preferential votes out of 20,522 votes cast for GERB.

In the Varna section, where he got most preferences, he got mere 24 votes - no comparison to his score in Lyubimets.

The same unusual patterns emerged in the election results in villages for Liliana Pavlova, former infrastructure and European...