Turnout in Saturday's European Parliament elections reached 34.38 per cent It was the highest ever in the history of Slovakia's five European elections.

This was stated by members of the State Commission for Elections and Control of Political Party Financing and the Statistical Office (SO).

Voters in the Bratislava region, which recorded the highest turnout - 44.53 percent, contributed the most to the overall result. On the contrary, the lowest turnout was recorded in the Košice region, where it reached 28.33 per cent.

"Among the districts, the highest turnout was in the Bratislava I district, i.e. in Bratislava's Old Town (52.03 per cent), the lowest in the Revúca district (22.50 per cent)," Martin Nemky, chairman of the SO, told at a press conference. 

Within the municipalities, the highest voter turnout was recorded in the municipality of Potok in the Ružomberok district, where it reached 90 percent. The smallest share of voters came to vote in the village of Lomnička in the Stará Ľubovňa district, where the turnout reached only 1.03 percent.

Nemky also reported that the total tallying time took six hours and 40 minutes. "It was more than three hours shorter than five years ago," he pointed out. The first minutes were processed on Saturday 17 minutes after 10 p.m., the last on Sunday at 4.25 a.m. This was in the Palárikovo precinct, where voting was extended due to an incident - the discovery of white powder in the first hours of the election.

Read more here

In the capital's 6th Primary School "Count N.P. Ignatiev", the voting machine is placed in a way that reveals the secrecy of the vote. 

This morning at 8.35 a.m. the turnout in Slovenia is estimated at 41.36% (698,736 voters). The preliminary results are a disappointment for the ruling Liberals (Svoboda), who only managed to win 2 seats in the European Parliament. Overall, the right-wing conservative parties were more successful than the left, winning 5 of the 9 available seats, 4 of which went to the far-right SDS.

The final turnout in Poland was 40.65% Turnout until 5 p.m. was 28.20% Turnout until 12:00 was 11.66%

Research shows that young people in Poland were not very interested in the European Parliament elections. Only 25.6% of people aged 18-29 took part. Other age groups were more active. 32.9% of people aged 30-39, 38.5% aged 40-49, 47.4% aged 50-59 and 47.3% aged over 60.

The exit polls by  IPSOS in Poland shows:

By seats in EP: KO - 21 PiS - 19 Konfederacja - 6 Trzecia Droga - 4 Lewica - 3

By votes percentage:   KO - 38,2 PiS - 33,9 Konfederacja - 11,9 Trzecia Droga - 8,2 Lewica - 6,6 Bezpartyjni - 0,8 Polexit - 0,3

Forecasted turnout: 39,7%

Turnout in this year's European Parliament elections increased in Czechia by almost eight percentage points to 36.5 percent compared to 2019. The Czech Republic will now be represented by eight female MEPs. This is a slight improvement over the previous election period, with one more woman elected. The proportion of women in the 21-member Czech delegation is now 38%.

Once again, preferential votes helped women. Thanks to these votes, Pirate Party candidate Markéta Gregorová secured a mandate, moving up from the originally unelectable second place on the candidate list. Without preferential votes, only 7 women (33.3%) would have been elected, the same as in the previous elections.

The official results are available on the website of the Czech Statistical Office.

The State Electoral Commission of the Republic of Croatia has published new information.  At 11 pm only 21.34 % of voters have voted in Croatia so far, while 99.82 % of polling stations were processed by now. For comparison, in 2019, the total was 29.85% of voters that came to the polls.

After the closing of polling stations the final turnout is still not clear but it has definitely exceeded 27% as it was announced at 27.11 % at 9.45 pm. Due to the fact that polling stations are still open in some other countries, preliminary results will be published after 11pm local time.

Spokesman for Croatian State Electoral Commission (CSEC), Slaven Hojski, told Croatian Radio Television that the election day was going smoothly, and the election silence was broken incomparably less than in the recent parliamentary elections. 

Complaints of violation mainly refer to posts on social networks and e-mails, and some citizens complained that flyers of some candidates were dropped into their mailboxes this morning.

The CSEC will process it in the coming days and weeks and see what is really a violation and what is not a violation of election silence before anything is forwarded to DORH (Croatian State Attorney's Office), said Hojski.

Unofficial results at 40% show DISY at 24.8% (looses five points compared to 2019) AKEL at 21.3% (it looses six points), lone rider Fidias at 19.3%, extreme right ELAM at 11.3%, DIKO at 9.8% (it looses four points! Statistically this is the final picture of vote share and the allocation of seats is two for DISY, one for AKEL (looses one), one for Fidias and one for each ELAM and DIKO. First time appearance by Volt, which gathered 3.1%.

"Unofficial" counting of votes at about 25% show right wing party DISY, member of EPP at 24%, second the left wing AKEL at 22.5% and youtuber sole rider at 18.5%, with extreme right ELAM at 11,5%, the Democratic Party (DIKO) at 9.5% and socialist EDEK at 4.5%, (for both DIKO and EDEK their lowest ever score). The above may mean, DISY gets two seats, AKEL only one from two in 2019, and one for each, Fidias, ELAM and DIKO.

Opinion polls show that the two major parties, the right wing Democratic Rally (DISY) and the left wing (AKEL) are not certain to secure the two seats they have held since 2004. The prediction of around 25% for each cannot provide a solid basis for the final result. The big surprise is the vote share predicted for Fidias Panayiotou, a youtuber with around five million followers who appears to get nearly 15%, the third biggest vote. This means that the Democratic party which has been holding the third place since 1991 is becoming fourth or fifth. Extreme right ELAM appears to secure nearly 12% and competes with the Democratic party for the fourth place.

Read more on that here

According to the national electoral commission, voter turnout in the European Parliament elections was over 25 percent (432,651) by 4 pm. The polling stations close at 7 pm.

It's Election Day, and turnout is the main focus. The media's repeated warnings about election surprises are becoming predictable.

Let's delve into the historical context of election turnout in Romania. In the first European parliamentary elections in Romania (2007 – incomplete mandate, 2009, 2014), the turnout was around 30% (approx. 29%, 27%, respectively 32%). This is a crucial piece of information that often gets overlooked. In the last ones, 2019 attendance was 51%, without mergers and other issues that could influence attendance. Notably, attendance at the 2020 local elections was lower at the national level than at the 2019 European Parliament elections.

The surprise was immense then (I mean 2019), including for sociological research institutes, because many of them had proposed before those elections a table of the hierarchy of results calculated from a much smaller turnout. This is perhaps because they considered an atypically high turnout at the European Parliament to be unbelievable. I am happy to say that the colleagues from Inscop, with whom I worked intensively then, avoided falling into this trap. But we can come back to that episode later in the evening.

What I think the public should know is the fact that the difficulty of an electoral forecast carried out by an opinion poll with a certain period before the voting day is not to find out the distribution of electoral preferences, but to get as close as possible to the actual turnout that will be in the day of the vote. This is a complex task, and one that is crucial for accurate electoral predictions. And to calculate the distribution of votes by party from this estimate of attendance as close as possible to reality.

So when we see figures in the mass media before the elections that tell us what percentages the parties will take on the day of the vote, let us ask ourselves from which attendance estimate those votes are calculated. And possibly how attendance was estimated. And possibly if a different turnout scenario (which the pollsters certainly have) would lead to a different party hierarchy and other numbers.

We will see some European elections today, like in 2019, rather than in previous years. Perhaps with a slightly higher turnout, the interest of local leaders in securing their votes goes hand in hand with a very good turnout at the European Parliament today.

But it is not necessarily a surprise. Ever since the second half of last year (and before today's elections), several polls have been working with estimates of a good turnout at the European Parliament. The European elections seem to have stopped being "the most boring elections in Romania," as they said in 2007, 2009, or 2014. The results of today's elections will show us why.