Low voter turnout makes Polish referendum about border fence with Belarus nonbinding

October 16, Pozirk. A 40 percent voter turnout at October 15 referendum in Poland makes its results invalid, Gazeta Wyborcza reported.

One of the referendum questions was whether to keep or remove the border fence at the shared border with Belarus.

Earlier, Belarusian authorities urged Poles to support the demolition of the fence citing environmental reasons.

In June, the Polish Border Guard reported the completion of a 206-kilometer wall equipped with 3,000 surveillance cameras and 400 km of detector cables to contain an inflow of illegal migrants.

It was one of the measures to resolve the migration crisis at the Belarus-EU border which dates back to the spring of 2021. It escalated in November 2021 when thousands of migrants set up a camp and stormed the Polish border. The Baltic states and Poland accused Belarusian authorities of creating the trouble, while the latter blamed it on the West.