They frowned and sighed, folded and squeezed - determined to vote despite the challenge of a giant sized ballot paper that came up beyond their waists. In the southern Bulgarian municipality of Sandanski and around the country voters struggled Wednesday to cast their ballots in local elections that have attracted a plethora of candidates.
"Look! what a mess," said 69-year-old Mitko Chorbov, pointing with his walking stick at a sample of the voting ballots posted outside the polling station in the village of Djigurovo, some 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of the capital Sofia.
With a staggering 420 candidates from 40 political parties, plus 28 independents, the voting slip for 29 seats at the Sandanski municipal council ran over 1.2 metres (four feet) in length.
The 600 voters in Djigurovo were also faced with two more separate ballots for Sandanski mayor and their local village mayor. "That's what happens when all at once anyone and everyone decides they might as well pocket some easy EU money," Chorbov said.
The large number of candidates has partly been attributed to the prospect of 1.4 billion euros (two billion dollars) in EU regional development funding which the bloc plans to make available to Bulgaria starting this year to 2013. "We are a tiny village and even here some closing rallies were like rock concerts and all candidates spoke about the big money coming from Brussels. Obviously, the stakes are extremely high," 59-year-old retired engineer Lyuben Galev said. "Just imagine, a father and his son are separately running for mayor here," Galev said, winking.
A bunch of elderly women stood on tiptoe and changed pairs of glasses to consult the ballot samples, as a poll booth staffer instructed them how to fold the three voting slips to get them into the envelope and squeeze it in the ballot box.
By 10:00 am (0800 GMT), just two hours after voting began, the urn was already half stuffed. "It was difficult for me. I cannot read and it took me some time to remember the numbers of my candidates and then find them on the ballot. I am glad it's over," a 62-year-old Roma, Anka Dimitrova, said in broken Bulgarian.
The last week of the campaign saw a number of vote-buying allegations in the press and on television, but 73-year-old Slavcho Mikov seemed unworried by the prospect of fraud. "With a ballot this size, even the bought people will make a mistake," he said.
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