Elections 2023: Bulgaria votes for mayors and municipal councilors

Today, Bulgarian citizens elect municipal councilors, mayors of municipalities, mayors of regions - in Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna, and mayors of town halls. The election day started at 7:00 a.m. and ended at 8:00 p.m., and could be extended until 9:00 p.m. if there were non-voting voters in front of the section. In local elections, sections are not formed and voting is not done abroad.

The number of polling stations is a total of 12,299, of which 442 are mobile polling stations.

About 20 million paper ballots were printed for the local vote. There will be no machine voting in the elections, after the Central Election Commission (CEC) decided on Friday to vote only by paper ballot in all polling stations.

The longest ballots are those for the Metropolitan Municipality - 60 centimeters. The second longest is the ballot for municipal councilors in the Municipality of Varna. The ballots for municipal councilors are the widest, and for the mayor of a municipality they will be slightly narrower. The narrowest is the ballot for mayor of a town hall, the length of which varies depending on the registered lists. The longest name of a local coalition is in Dimitrovgrad - 318 characters.

Today there is an election of 35 regional mayors - 24 in Sofia, six in Plovdiv and five in Varna; 265 mayors of municipalities; 3,041 mayors of town halls and 5,053 municipal councilors.

There are a total of 30,203 candidates for municipal councilors, and in 2019 they were 29,433. For municipal mayors, 1,355 candidates were registered. 6915 candidates are registered for mayors of town halls. 445 candidates have been registered for regional mayors, of which 339 are men and 106 are women, according to CEC data as of 4:00 p.m. on October 27.

There are the most mandates for municipal councilors in the Capital Municipality - 61. The smallest number of mandates is 11, in 47 municipalities, BTA reports.

58 parties and nine coalitions are registered to participate in the local vote in the CEC. At the local level, there are registered local coalitions and initiative committees. The numbers of the local coalitions and independent candidates on the ballot follow the numbers of the parties and coalitions, according to the order in which the applications were entered in the register of the municipal election commissions.

According to CEC data published on the commission's website, the number of voters on the electoral rolls for voting is 6,038,622 people.