Belitsa votes after mayor's arrest as boycott threat fizzles
In Belitsa, poll workers from the DPS party's quota had threatened to refuse ballot papers in protest at the mayor's arrest. In the end, almost the entire commission turned up, BNT reported.
Symbolic image · Photo: User№101 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
In the municipality of Belitsa in southwestern Bulgaria, the presidential election is being held under unusual circumstances: the mayor was arrested earlier in the week, prompting warnings of an election boycott. On Saturday, some members of the polling station commissions from the quota of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) announced that they would refuse to accept the election materials in protest, public broadcaster BNT reported.
The handover nevertheless went ahead normally because nearly all commission members showed up. Most members and chairs come from other towns, a practice the municipality has followed since the last parliamentary election. This time, only two members were replaced. A deputy chair told BNT she had no concerns whatsoever. Municipal secretary Ilyaz Dagonov said everything had been handed over administratively and that officials would monitor proceedings on election day.
In the Blagoevgrad region, the most replacements were in the municipality of Petrich, where 123 of 748 poll workers were replaced, according to BNT. The mayor of Belitsa is presumed innocent.