Bulgaria 2024 October Parliamentary Election

Decision No. 1 of 13 March 2025 listed violations in the replacement of polling-station commission members, in the drafting of the polling-station protocol under Article 282(2) of the Electoral Code, in the packing of election material under Article 284, in the live video monitoring and video recording required by Article 272, in establishing the result from both paper and machine ballots under Article 206(1) read with Article 278(2) and (3), and in entering the voting data in the protocol under Article 281. It instructed the Central Election Commission to redetermine the mandate distribution and announce the names of those elected, which the Commission did the same day.

Of 287 ballots examined, the marks on 95 in section 060800027 (Vratsa district), 72 in section 122400033 (Montana) and 106 in section 152400205 (Pleven) were not made by individual voters. The Court recorded those votes as invalid in the recalculated result.

The recount covered 2,204 of 12,879 polling stations, about 17 per cent. Valid votes were re-counted in 1,768 stations, and the distribution of votes between the lists changed in 46.75 per cent of the protocols checked; invalid ballots were checked in a further 436 stations, with differences in 35.78 per cent. The Court recorded that in more than 90 per cent of those cases the change followed from a polling-station commission judging a ballot valid or invalid in a way that did not conform to the Electoral Code, usually within one or two votes per list, and that commissions had most often been restrictive, treating a ballot as invalid because the mark ran outside the box of a list without entering the box of another. The largest net changes were 1,110 votes for DPS-New Beginning, 452 for GERB-SDS and 108 for Vazrazhdane, all downward, and 59 upward for Velichie.

The Constitutional Court obtained a Central Election Commission list of 43 polling stations that fell outside the legal exemption yet carried out no live video monitoring and no recording of the count and the drafting of the protocol. The Commission separately told ODIHR that 63 of the 11,626 stations that should have been equipped with CCTV provided no live feed or recording.

Since the 2021 amendment to Article 271 of the Electoral Code, polling-station commissions establish the machine result by counting the printed machine ballots rather than reading a protocol from the system, while the obligation to record the vote on the machine's memory device and to hand it up the chain remains in force. The Court said the chronology of machine-voting amendments showed no consistent legislative concept, that the rules were changed twice within three and a half years contrary to the standard of not amending electoral law less than a year before an election, and that no procedure was ever created for what a commission must do when the machine fails to print a ballot showing the voter's choice.

The figures cover the period from the start of the campaign to 14:00 on 28 October 2024, and break down by appellate district as Sofia 37, Burgas 32, Varna 31, Veliko Tarnovo 9 and Plovdiv 6.

The Court held that the violations it found, although they had a negative effect on the transparency of and trust in the whole electoral process, did not make the voters' will impossible to establish and did not change the result to a degree that would justify annulling the election in full and requiring citizens to vote again. It separately left without consideration, as out of time, a request by 58 members of the 50th National Assembly to declare the election unlawful in the 15th Pleven and 25th Sofia districts.

The Court found the voter-list complaints unfounded, noting that adding an eligible citizen to a list abroad on election day is not in itself a breach and that no evidence was submitted of ineligible people being added. A check by the civil registration directorate GRAO, ordered by the Central Election Commission, identified 10 people who voted abroad without the right to do so and 55 people who voted more than once in the country and abroad combined.

The Court said it could not establish a link between the violations it found and particular mandates, because seats are allocated nationally, and it identified the affected members only through the Commission's recalculation. The ruling makes no finding on responsibility, and the handwriting finding covers three polling stations.

Prosecutors opened 115 pre-trial proceedings by 28 October 2024. Vote-buying was raised by one of the petitioners before the Constitutional Court but the Court made no finding on it and did not rest its decision on it. ODIHR has recorded such allegations across successive Bulgarian elections, including in vulnerable communities, and has also cautioned that public debate on vote-buying tends to portray Roma falsely as the source of the problem, and that measures taken by the authorities against alleged vote-buying, including Interior Ministry raids in Roma neighbourhoods before the 9 June 2024 election, could have adversely affected campaigning or voting there.

The challenges before the Constitutional Court concerned domestic administration of the vote, and the ruling makes no finding on any foreign or online operation. Interlocutors met by ODIHR's February 2026 assessment mission raised concerns about the potential misuse of online platforms, including artificial amplification of content and disinformation, and about the absence of a dedicated inter-institutional framework for monitoring such threats; those concerns were framed around the 2026 election and were not attributed to the October 2024 vote.