• Find more information and the full data from the parallel count at www.fairelections-bulgaria.eu

Building trust

Trust in elections is shattered in the Bulgarian population after numerous incidents of fraud in past elections.
For the first time in an EU member-state, the OSCE war deploying a full observation mission for the parliamentary elections on May 12, 2013. Bulgarian opposition parties have teamed up in an unprecedented move to organize a parallel vote count.

SORA provided its well-proven technical and statistical know-how. First results have been published already in the night of May 12 online.

International precedents

Since the 1980s, election monitoring organisations have carried out parallel vote counts in elections all over the world.
In Bulgaria,  a parallel tabulation confirmed the victory by the Bulgarian Socialist Party in the first democratic elections in 1990. This convinced supporters of the opposition that the victory was not the result of vote count fraud. In this way, the parallel count helped calm the situation and laid the groundwork for later democratic changes of government.

Full transparency

International institutions such as "Democracy International" recommend parallel vote tabluation as a reliable method to enhance credibility of elections. The parallel count and publication of election results makes independent scrutiny tangible for the broad public.

SORA thus publishes the parallel count in real-time online. Citizens can browse results from national level down to each precinct and also download a scanned protocol from the 11.902 local election commissions. Also the source code of the count is provided online.

Image Source: Rama, Wikimedia