site.btaMachine Voting Rules Set for October 25 Presidential Election

The Central Election Commission (CEC) has set the terms and procedure for machine voting in Bulgaria's presidential election on October 25, the commission said Tuesday.

Machine voting will be conducted in all voting sections except those in the country with fewer than 300 voters; sections where voting is conducted using a mobile ballot box; sections in medical establishments, homes for the elderly and other specialized institutions providing social services; sections on vessels flying the Bulgarian flag; and sections outside the country for which fewer than 300 applications have been submitted or where fewer than 300 voters cast ballots in the previous election.

The addresses and numbers of the voting sections where machine voting will be conducted will be announced by the CEC and published on the websites of the CEC and the respective constituency election commissions.

The CEC will also organize, oversee and monitor the conduct of machine voting and the processing of data from it, and will compile and analyse the results, the commission also decided.

Machine voting will be conducted using specialized machine voting devices (SMVDs) and software certified by the Ministry of Innovation and Digital Transformation, the Bulgarian Institute for Standardization and the Bulgarian Institute of Metrology. To enhance security, a new Trusted Build will be performed on the certified version of the software using the already certified source code and UEFI keys held only by the CEC, under a public procedure.

Under provisions of the Election Code, representatives of parties, coalitions and nomination committees registered to participate in the election, Bulgarian non-governmental organizations that have registered election observers, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences may take part in the public procedure. They will be given access to the source code of the SMVD software.

For machine voting, ballots will be displayed on a touchscreen, on which voters will mark their choice unambiguously. The ballots will be designed in the same way as paper ballots.

The CEC will approve the ballot design. In sections where machine voting is conducted, voters will cast their ballots using an SMVD, which records their vote and issues a control receipt. If machine voting becomes impossible due to unforeseen external circumstances, the section election commission will immediately notify the constituency election commission, which will notify the CEC. Following a decision by the constituency election commission, voting will continue using paper ballots.

If machine voting becomes impossible due to unforeseen external circumstances and a tally sheet cannot be printed by the SMVD at the end of election day, the voting results will be established on the basis of the control receipts counted from machine voting.

The CEC will also organize and conduct training and an information campaign on machine voting.

In July, Parliament decided that voting would be conducted entirely by machine in sections with more than 300 voters. The decision was made with the adoption at second reading of Election Code amendments.