Central Election Commission

Bulgaria's April 4 2021 parliamentary elections headed into the final stretch ahead of polls closing at 8pm, with problems with voting machines reported from various places, allegations of vote-buying, websites penalised for illegally publishing exit polls and indications on strong interest in voting abroad.

Of the 6,986 candidates for Bulgaria's 45th Parliament, 2,073 are women and 4,913 are men. A total of 1,035 candidates have been registered in two regions, well over the 668 in the previous parliamentary elections in 2017, Dimitar Dimitrov, a member and spokesman for the Central Election Commission, told reporters on Sunday.

According to the latest results of a survey by Alpha Research, conducted between March 27th and 30th among 1,007 adult Bulgarians across the country.

The US State Department came out with a report on human rights observance in Bulgaria for 2020 which criticizes the Bulgarian government for insufficient efforts towards countering human rights abuse and violators' impunity.

Below is the executive summary of the report published on the official site of the US Embassy in Sofia.

An 18-member delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), led by Alfred Heer (Switzerland, ALDE), will observe the conduct of the parliamentary elections in Bulgaria, the organization wrote on its website, https://pace.coe.int/, on Monday.

There will be 465 polling stations abroad for the April 4 general elections, the spokesperson of Bulgaria's Central Election Commission (CEC), Tanya Tsaneva, said at a briefing on March 25. Last week, the commission appointed the members of the sectional election commissions outside the country.

Bulgaria's Central Election Commission (CEC) has determined the places in 69 countries where there will be polling stations Bulgaria for voting in the upcoming parliamentary elections on April 4.

The US Ambassador to Tirana, Yuri Kim, has put fresh pressure on Albanian parties to vet their lists of candidates submitted to the Central Election Commission, CEC, ahead of the April 25 elections, suggesting some should be disqualified.

As many as 87,796 expatriate Bulgarians have submitted applications for voting abroad in the April 4 parliamentary elections by the deadline, which expired at 24:00 on March 9, the Central Election Commission (CEC) told BTA.

The number is nearly double the 45,000 or so applications submitted for the previous parliamentary elections in 2017.

The Border Police will also watch over the security of voting machines. According to the Bulgarian Minister of Interior, special arrangements have been made for the upcoming parliamentary elections.