Bulgaria CEC confirms 27 presidential candidate pairs for October elections

The Central Election Commission (CEC) of Bulgaria has finalized several key details for the upcoming presidential elections on October 25. A total of 27 presidential candidate pairs, representing 20 initiative committees and 7 political parties, have been confirmed.

To ensure transparency, section election commissions will perform a manual recount of the receipts printed by voting machines at the end of election day. While the machine-generated protocol serves as the official result, the manual count of receipts will be recorded in the protocol and scanned alongside the paper version to verify accuracy.

Regarding international voting, over 35,500 applications have been submitted from 72 countries. Polling stations will be organized in locations where more than 40 people have applied to vote. Out of approximately 11,600 total polling stations, over 3,000 will utilize voting machines, while the remainder will use paper ballots. The CEC has also approved technical specifications for both paper ballots and the specialized paper required for machine voting.