In Bulgaria, between 12 and 15,000 votes are needed for one deputy seat. However, the votes from abroad are nothing special – their electoral influence is about half a percent. Mandates from abroad do not depend on votes, but on the proportion of votes. This was stated in an interview with Dir.bg by the mathematician Prof. Mihail Konstantinov, who is chairman of “Information Services”. He added that there could be a postponement of elections only in case of war and a severe natural disaster, and stressed that if 3 million voters voted on April 4, he would be very happy, but not at all. In our country elections were postponed in 1943 – at the height of World War II.
– Mr. Konstantinov, could you explain how the votes and percentages are transformed into mandates?
– The Bulgarian system for parliamentary elections is doubly proportional. It has three stages. At the first stage, the mandates of the individual parties are distributed. We are interested, for example, in party 1, how many terms it will have, party 2 how many there will be, and so on. Until 2005, this was done by the method of the Belgian mathematician D “Ondt. After 2007, the method of Hare – Niemeyer is used. This method works in pure proportion. , 6% you get 30.6% of 240 seats, in which case the number you take is about 73.44 seats.
Whether these 0.44 will do a term or not, this is done by the method of the largest remainder. The whole parts of the mandates are distributed and then the largest balance receives the first mandate, the next balance receives a second mandate, until the mandates that are not distributed are exhausted. This does not mean that if you have a balance above 0.5 you will necessarily receive a mandate may not be obtained. A mandate of 0.4, for example, can also be obtained. But this is not so important, because in the end we have an almost full proportion of votes and mandates. And anyone, knowing what percentage his favorite party has, can multiply that percentage by 240 and see how many MPs the party has.
In this account I am talking about, the votes from abroad are added to the votes of the parties in the country. This method is one of the most proportionate. And this step can be done by anyone who has a calculator. Here it may be appropriate to say that the votes from abroad from 1991 to 2017 changed a total of 15 seats from 2160. Thus, the votes from abroad have an electoral influence of about half a percent, more precisely 0.7 percent.
Then begins the distribution of seats by region, which is initially done by the same method, taking the party’s votes by region, but may not come out the total number of seats of individual parties, which is firmly determined in the first step.
That is why a third step is made – corrections. Pure proportion is guaranteed at the national level, at the regional level there is a certain disproportion, somewhere there are so-called paradoxes, where it is possible to get a mandate with very few votes. Once in the Vidin region, a mandate was received with 434 votes. This is because the respective party has won some votes abroad, which have given it a mandate, and it must fall in some of the Bulgarian regions. If there was an area abroad, the mandates could be distributed more evenly.
– This year it seems that many more Bulgarians from abroad will vote, and there are many more sections in places. Do you expect more mandates from abroad in these elections?
– Note that the mandates from abroad do not depend on how many votes there are, but on the ratio between the votes. Ie a party will receive seats from abroad if its votes are in a different proportion than in the country. If the votes abroad are in a proportion close to that of the country, they carry zero seats. Imagine that in the country one party received 100,000 votes, the other received 200,000 votes, they will distribute their seats in a ratio of 80 to 160. Imagine that abroad for the first party voted 1,000,000, and for the second 2,000,000. What mandates will the parties take? They will be the same. Because the ratio is maintained. So it does not matter whether there are many or few votes abroad, but whether these votes are in the same proportion as in the country, or in a different proportion.
As there is one party that receives proportionally more votes abroad than at home, it has won these 15 seats for 27 years. But these 15 terms are about 1-2 per parliament, this is nothing special.
– With how many votes can there be a mandate? There was an MP who came in with about 800 votes, apart from the example you gave above?
– This mandate is in Kyustendil and it is not with 800 votes, it is say with 12,000 votes, only the votes were received from abroad. And when a party gets a mandate with the votes from abroad, it has to put it somewhere, because there is no foreign region. That is why this mandate falls somewhere where the party has few votes. If you introduce the so-called term mandate price, you will see that for all parties the price is almost the same and it is approximately equal to the number of actual votes divided by 240. In Bulgaria this is between 12,000 and 15,000 votes.
– Can the election be postponed because of the pandemic and will it affect the mandates?
“You’re asking me a question with great difficulty.” Historically, Bulgaria has only once had something like a postponement of elections. More precisely, they did not take place. On August 28, 1943, the great Bulgarian Tsar Boris III died, and his successor, Tsar Simeon II, was small and regents had to be appointed. According to the Tarnovo Constitution, regents are elected by the Grand National Assembly, because it is like electing a king. However, Bulgaria is at war and that is why elections for the Grand National Assembly are not held, and the Ordinary National Assembly, which was in force at the time, appoints the regents. There is no postponement of elections in the new Bulgarian history. This can happen in a war or a severe natural disaster. Whether COVID-19 will be judged to be a severe natural disaster, I cannot say, but there are less than two weeks until the elections. The election machine is like a heavy train. You can’t stop it when it occurs to you.
– What voter turnout do you envisage for this COVID-19 and how will this affect it?
– I do not know exactly how many voters in Bulgaria. All Bulgarian voters in all countries are 6,700,000, these are Bulgarian citizens over 18 years of age, whether in the country or abroad. These are the data of GRAO for the Bulgarian citizens. A person who does not have a PIN and Bulgarian identity documents is not a Bulgarian citizen. There are 1,400,000 Bulgarian citizens abroad. About 1,000,000 of them are voters. Thus, there are about 5,700,000 voters in Bulgaria. Therefore, I will not talk about turnout in percentages, but rather about the number of people who will vote. If 3 million people vote, I personally will be very happy. However, there is a danger that they will fall to 2,500,000, and according to a particularly pessimistic scenario, they could go to 2 million. The number 2 million is the number that was obtained in the European elections. Twice in European elections, 2 million people voted. Because the Bulgarian does not care who will go to Europe to receive the high salary. While in the parliamentary elections in our country an average of 3,600,000 people voted. This has been the case for the last decade. Now, if 3,000,000 vote, it will be very good. But unlikely.
“Many of the parties are talking about dead souls …”
“I just told the dead souls.” They are mainly Bulgarian voters abroad – 1,000,000. We sometimes call these voters dead souls or phantoms, because they are on the electoral roll, but they are not present in the country, they are not present in the section where their names appear. And there is no way their names will not appear there, because we do not have an Act for active registration. I have been fighting with dead souls for 25 years and they are still 1,000,000. These are our compatriots abroad, from whom I now expect about 150,000 to vote. And hopefully their votes will have some significance. In 2017, they had no electoral significance. Otherwise, they have moral significance.
– And how much do you expect them to vote with machines and will this make the choice difficult, in your opinion?
– I can tell you what it was like in 2019. Then there were European elections, there were 3000 machines. There will now be over 9,000 machines, or three times as many. What did the practice from 2019 show? That in every section where there was a machine, 27% chose the machine. Whether it will be so on April 4, I do not know, I tell you what it was. One must know one’s history in order to foresee the future.
I do not want to be a bad prophet, but Bulgaria is entering a perfect election storm. A pandemic with many infected and dead, unprepared commissions, mass machine voting (in Europe only the city of Brussels votes like that), preferences, unnecessarily complicated section protocols. God save Bulgaria!
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