Elections 2 in 1 or elections on two consecutive Sundays - these are the most likely options for the upcoming early parliamentary and regular European elections. However, they will be the eighth and ninth elections in the last three years - after five votes for parliament, one for president and one for mayors.
The previous seven votes cost us BGN 710 million, according to the data of the "Open Parliament", quoted by BNT.
Expectedly, the most expensive elections are the local ones - with the two rounds at the end of October and the beginning of November, they cost over 188 million BGN, over 16 million of which were for the machine vote, which was only in the runoff .
The last parliamentary elections - in April last year, cost over 106 million BGN.
30 million cheaper were the previous ones - also for the National Assembly, in October 2022.
The last 2 in 1 elections we had were in November 2021 - presidential and parliamentary. They cost the budget almost BGN 150 million.
Almost BGN 74 million was the parliamentary vote 4 months earlier - in July 2021. Then for the first time we voted only by machines in the precincts with over 300 voters without the choice of paper ballots.
2021 was the year with as many as three parliamentary votes - the first ones in April then cost us almost 109 million BGN.
The largest share of the funds is for the remuneration of the members of the section, district and municipal election commissions – a total of nearly BGN 240 million. Machines are also a significant part - the public procurement that the CEC is launching now for the European Parliament elections, for transport and logistics alone, is worth almost one million BGN.