Bulgaria votes for president today, with a possible runoff on Nov. 1
Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time for 6.59 million Bulgarians to elect a president and vice president. Voting abroad began on Saturday evening, starting in Auckland.
Archive image · Photo: OSCE Parliamentary Assembly from Copenhagen, Denmark / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped and resized)
Bulgaria is electing a president and vice president on Sunday. Polling stations across the country open at 7 a.m. local time and close at 8 p.m.; voters still waiting in line by then may cast their ballots until 9 p.m. at the latest. According to the Central Election Commission (CEC), 6.59 million people are eligible to vote, including 46,001 first-time voters. Twenty-seven tickets are on the ballot.
Bulgarians abroad have already started voting: the first polling stations opened in Auckland, New Zealand, at 9 p.m. Bulgarian time on Saturday, the Foreign Ministry said. There are 613 polling stations in 60 countries in total, 70 of them in Germany. The last to close will be those in California and Nevada, at 5 a.m. Bulgarian time on Monday. At home, voting is by machine in 9,373 polling stations; the printout from the device is stamped and dropped into the ballot box.
The frontrunners are incumbent Iliana Iotova and her running mate Kiril Valchev, backed among others by Progressive Bulgaria and the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), and Andrey Gyurov with Georgi Kandev of the PP–DB alliance. In the latest Myara poll, Iotova and Valchev stood at 43.4%, Gyurov and Kandev at 28.9%. If no one wins an absolute majority in the first round, the top two will meet in a runoff on Nov. 1, which has been needed in every presidential election since direct elections were introduced. The CEC must announce the official final result within three days.