The amendments made to the Electoral Code a few months ahead of the parliamentary polls led to a vast number of invalid ballots, compared to previous elections.

Around a month before election day, Euronews Albania’s weekly “Me Pak Fjalë” warned that many citizens had not been adequately informed on the way they would have to cast their ballot, referring to specific raw data from the surveys conducted by Euronews Albania and the company MRB, which showed that about 27% of potential voters were “not clear” about the new rules.

This is the eighth time in the last 30 years that polls are held with a different system from the preceding one, while changes to the electoral system and voting method were only established a few days before election day.

In total, there were 1,662,386 ballots cast on April 25, of which 83,024 were invalid, that is 5%.

This is a comparatively high number from previous polls when invalid votes would not exceed 47,000.

To put it differently, if all these votes were cast for a single political party, it would rank fourth behind the SP, DP, and SMI.

Bear in mind that the Social Democratic Party received 35,000 votes, which were enough to secure three seats in parliament.

On average, invalid votes in every county were around 5.42%, with the highest recorded in Dibra (6.78%) and the lowest in Tirana (3.8%).