Vanya Grigorova will challenge results of Sofia's mayoral elections in court, Mayor-elect Terziev not worried about his opponent's intentions

The team of Sofia mayoral candidate Vanya Grigorova (nominated by the local coalition "BSP for Bulgaria), said on November 7 that by the end of the week, they will appeal the final results of the mayoral elections. Today, her team said that they have found new violations.

Sofia's mayor-elect, Vassil Terziev, said he does not feel worried about the stated intention of his opponent to contest the election results in court.

Apart from corrected protocols outside polling stations and illegitimate hashcodes on the machines, pointed out yesterday by Vanya Grigorova's team, today they announced that they have come across more election violations.

"Doing a check of the protocols, we find that we have many - indeed - hundreds of protocols of the election commssions related to irregularities during election day, namely machine voting. There were no stamps on many receipts. So, by law, one stamp has to be put on the machine receipt. That is also what we will be asking the court to allow as an evidentiary request, to at least open the boxes, the bags of receipts. Because such a receipt is invalid," said Diana Tomova, a lawyer elected as a municipal councillor.

According to the winner of the mayoral elections in Sofia, Vassil Terziev, his opponent's claims are unfounded.

“I have no worries. As you can see, many of the voting discrepancies were actually to my detriment, rather than to my opponent's. Polling stations where I have 120 votes say the votes are 0. Others where I got 84 wrote that the votes for me were 9. It doesn't bother me. I know that we ran a good, positive campaign. All these machinations are beyond our team," Terziev said.

On the BNT "The Day Begins" programme, constitutional law expert Natalia Kiselova described two possible scenarios in the event of Electoral Code violations.

There are no grounds to demand new elections in Sofia, she said.

"One option is to have these votes excluded from the total number of votes for candidates. If there are such significant differences between the two candidates and the results narrow the gap between them and bring them closer, or there is a swap - then we can already talk about changing the decision of the municipal election commission. I think this is very bold to say, but it is possible.

My colleagues and I have calculated that if the runoff results are challenged before the Administrative Court and then before the Supreme Administrative Court, because they are usually not satisfied with the decision of the first instance, by the New Year, we can say that this judicial saga can end," she said.

The deadline for the Municipal Election Commission to officially announce the results from the runoff in Sofia expires tonight after 9 pm. Even if the results are challenged in court - the new mayor's inauguration will not be delayed.

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"We needed just a little more to win against the other coalition. All the power, financial, and technical resources available to We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria and GERB-UDF were mobilised against us," Vanya Grigorova commented the results of the local elections in Sofia on November 6.

According to Central Election Commission data, Grigorova lost the mayoral race to the other candidate, Vassil Terziev, by just 1% of the votes.

“Hope is still alive and freedom is an arm's reach away, which means 3,000 to 5,000 votes,” Grigorova said, referring to the margin of a few thousand votes by which Vassil Terziev won the Sofia mayoral elections.

"I would be the first to congratulate Mr. Terziev if the court decided that these results and the manner in which they were achieved were lawful," Grigorova said. According to Ivan Takov, chairman of BSP - Sofia, Grigorova's team were currently checking the protocols and counting the votes from the second round of voting in the capital. "We have enough grounds to challenge the final result of the election and we will do so according to all the rules," Takov pointed out.

Takov said that they are talking about contesting the election results and not nullifying them.

“The figures, assuming that they are real, show that there is a twofold increase in the number of people who believed in us and supported us between the first and second round. The actual increase is probably larger,” Vanya Grigorova noted. She said that in the first round of the local elections, they managed to overpower one of the candidates of the assemblage (GERB's candidate for Sofia mayor Anton Hekimyan) and were really close to overpowering the other part of the assemblage - WCC-DB's Vassil Terziev,” she said and added that despite all the resources WCC-DB and GERB-UDF had mobilised against her, she leads in 13 of the 24 boroughs in Sofia.