The mathematician Prof. Mihail Konstantinov made a hot analysis in front of “Monitor”, related to the election results, the vote itself purely in organizational terms and the possible scenarios for the next cabinet.
– Prof. Konstantinov, what is your assessment of the vote from a purely organizational point of view, were there any omissions?
– In organizational terms, the vote was better organized than I expected. In total, the election administration, about 80,000 people, put in a lot of effort and succeeded.
Somewhere people work for more than 48 hours non-stop. My colleagues from Information Services AD, as always, did a brilliant job of processing the results. We have been carrying out this activity since 2003 and there is no objection to our work. In these elections alone, we had to process 13 million numbers, or 4 times more than in the last parliamentary elections in 2017.
We worked in three shifts 24 hours a day. If we had not organized the work in this way, there was a danger that the processing of the results would be delayed beyond the legally set deadlines. However, we did a great job and I’m not at all embarrassed to say it. It was an honor and a privilege for me to be a member of this team.
– What did this vote show during the pandemic? It seems that neither the pandemic nor the rainy weather stopped the Bulgarians from going to the polls.
– That’s how it turns out. About 3 million 333 thousand voters or about half of the voters on the list voted. In our country, the people who have the right to vote (these are almost all Bulgarian citizens over 18) are 6 million and 800 thousand. Of these, 5 million and 800 thousand are in the country and about 1 million are abroad.
So the talk of 2, 3 and more million voters abroad is complete nonsense. Bulgarians abroad are less than 1 million and 400 thousand, and voters there, as I said, are less than 1 million. About 150,000 of them voted. This time 180,000 voted. There are many, but other times they voted almost as much.
These votes from abroad changed exactly 4 mandates: 3 of them were won by the party “There is such a people” by Mr. Stanislav Trifonov and 1 mandate was won by the coalition “Democratic Bulgaria”, which unites the urban left and the urban right. This coalition achieved a remarkable result in Sofia: 13 seats against 11 of GERB. And who lost these 4 mandates from voting abroad?
Well, GERB lost 3 mandates and BSP lost 1 mandate. Otherwise, for 10 parliamentary elections from 1991 to 2021, votes from abroad brought a total of 19 seats out of a total of 2,400, or somewhere around 0.8%. But it doesn’t matter that they are so few. The important thing is that the connection of the Bulgarians abroad with the homeland is maintained.
– Are there many errors in the protocols, especially compared to the previous vote?
– There were district election commissions in which more than three quarters of the received protocols of the PEC were with errors. Fortunately, most of the mistakes do not concern the votes for the parties, because there every member of the PEC from the respective party watches over the votes for his favorite party like an eagle, so that no one steals them. But such things as preferences and other insignificant things, according to the members of some commissions, remain a bit neglected and there are more mistakes.
The biggest idiocy was to make the section commissions summarize the data from the machine and paper voting. There the commissions wrote en masse 10 + 11 = 25 and other similar mathematically remarkable discoveries.
So we checked if the commissions could add numbers in the circle of 100. Well, it turned out to me that some of them can’t. Which we had predicted, but there was no one to hear us. Thank God, with a lot of hard work we managed to correct the mathematical discrepancies. And I repeat, it is not about the votes for the parties – they are careful there, but about other figures.
– What created the problem in this regard?
– The CEC is about to carry out a serious analysis of the problems that arose during the vote. I hope that your question will be answered there.
– What is the reason for the decrease in the number of invalid ballots?
– Of course, one of the reasons is the increased number of machines. But over the years, the percentage of invalid votes in our country, with one important exception, has always been in world norms. How does this actually stand? Contrary to the general misconception, the percentage of invalid votes in our country is not very high.
It is high only in the elections for municipal councilors, and only for the period after the introduction of preferences in 2015. In the local elections in 2007 and 2011, the invalid votes were 4%. It is not small, but it is more or less in the European norms (in Germany the invalid votes are up to 2%). There were no preferences then.
In 2015, preferences were introduced in the elections for municipal councilors and invalid votes jumped to 14% for these elections and an average of 6-7%. In 2019, preferences remained and the invalid votes in the elections for councilors remained at an outrageously high level of 15%. In the mayoral election, they were at least three times less.
It is obvious to me that the high percentage of invalid votes, and only in local elections for councilors, is due to preferences. However, I do not know what the specific mechanism is for this to happen. By the way, the highest percentage of invalid votes in local elections was in 1999. Somewhere around 33% had reached. I know it sounds like bad fiction, but it’s so much. Who does not believe, call me and I will explain.
– What did the machine vote actually show?
– Exactly 27% of the voters in the sections where there were machines voted by machine. These sections were over 9 thousand. This was exactly the percentage of machine voters in the 2019 European elections, when there were 3,000 machines. So with one free choice, exactly 27% of people choose to vote with machines. No study has been done on why, but these are the facts. And 43% of the voters preferentially chose to vote. Bulgarians are accustomed to this kind of majority choice and are already using it widely.
– Do you think machine voting should remain?
– As I said before, there is no machine voting in Europe. True, they vote with machines in India, in Brazil, in Venezuela. And in many American states. But in Europe, machine voting is only in the city of Brussels and the surrounding villages.
Not even in the rest of Belgium. Thus, in Europe, less than 1% of people vote with machines. And what is that? Me, yes. He writes it on the net. Where there were machines in Europe, they were thrown away. They were even banned in Germany. And it was banned by their Constitutional Court, so the issue is closed there. And what happened in our country in these elections?
By a decision of the Central Election Commission, voting with machines in the Veliko Tarnovo LED was suspended on April 4th due to an error in the software that shifted preferences. It is good that there were ballots everywhere with paper ballots. Otherwise, the Constitutional Court would have canceled the elections in Veliko Tarnovo, which would have been a catastrophe. It is not too late for something like this to happen, God forbid. A similar thing happened in MIR-Dobrich, but things were covered up there.
– Did the activity of Bulgarians abroad surprise you after all?
– The activity of Bulgarians abroad was relatively high, but other times there has been similar activity. In addition, I heard a lot of mocking comments about the choice made by many Bulgarians abroad. We must learn to respect our people and their choices. I doubt that those who mock their people are very smart.
The Bulgarian state has had it for more than 13 centuries, there is only one more such state in Europe. And the Bulgarian state is the Bulgarian people. I am proud to be Bulgarian. And my sons are proud. And the blasphemers of Bulgaria, history will skip them and forget them.
– Do you reject the possibility of early voting, since it is clear that it is difficult to form a cabinet in this situation?
– It is not my job to accept and reject anything. The Bulgarian voter showed his will on April 4 and politicians must comply with it. Personally, I think it is better not to have early elections, because the country is facing severe and urgent problems.
Last but not least, we need to think about the deteriorating situation in Ukraine and the possible involvement of NATO and Bulgaria in this conflict. In this case, by conflict I mean a war he did not understand.
For the last 75 years, Bulgaria has not fought a war. There is no such happy period in the history of our country, because there is nothing more terrible than war. There are almost no people in our country who remember the war. I hope we don’t need to remember. That then we will see what white kahari are. And what – black.
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