site.btaTISP Leader Trifonov: Manipulation of Optical Voting Scanners Is Impossible

In a Facebook post on Thursday, There Is Such a People (TISP) leader Slavi Trifonov said that falsification and manipulation of optical voting scanners are impossible.

He said that these devices are the best option for voting in Bulgaria, as with this type of voting, the machine prints a paper protocol indicating the number of ballots in the ballot box and how many votes each party has received, while the ballots remain in the sealed ballot box. The printed protocol and the sealed ballot box are then sent to the constituency election commission, where the data is entered.

Commission members at the polling stations don’t write protocols and therefore cannot falsify or replace them, and don’t count the ballots and therefore cannot destroy, scratch out, or invalidate them, Trifonov wrote. On the other hand, no one can hack the machine's software and generate fake votes for any party - something that has been proven in other countries using voting machines, added the TISP leader.

“Now answer for yourselves which parties are against it. Are they the ones whose members in the committees alter protocols, add, or destroy ballots, as well as those who tampered with the software of the machines, offered the codes of the voting machines, and whose deputy minister of E-government illegally photographed the code generation process and exported it to his phone,” he added.

“The election process is one of the most important things for democracy. Our vote must be fairly counted, and TISP is doing everything possible to make that happen,” added Slavi Trifonov.

Earlier in the day, the parliamentary session, which was supposed to discuss changes to the Election Code, was closed after a third check failed to establish a quorum.