In the Runoffs on Sunday: Machines might be Used for Voting in Bulgaria's Local Elections

If the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) rules against the decision of the Central Election Commission (CEC) to cancel machine voting, the devices may be used. This became known from the answers of Angel Petrov, chief secretary of the Ministry of e-Government during a press conference after a published interview with Deputy Minister Mihail Stoinov, who was accused of possible manipulation of the machine voting.

"Machines can be installed with this software, which we have certified, with this hash sum, which is visualized after the installation of the machine. Nothing needs to be changed, even one bit of information from this installation package," said Angel Petrov.

When asked by "Dnevnik" whether the Ministry of e-Government believes that a person from the ministry alerted the State Agency for National Security (SANS), Mihail Stoinov said that he could not speculate. Asked how the security agency could have decided to act on the case, since in the so-called reference, there are lines that sound like a witness account, from Petrov's answer it became known that it is possible that it was an initiative of the SANS itself. The reason is that, although according to the Election Code SANS has no relation to the processes of configuring the machines, it was invited to attend the stages, explained Petrov.

"SANS has never been regulated in any way in the process. Regardless, we have coordinated actions with it at every step. We invite them to trusted installation and to the provision of public code, precisely so that SANS can be assured that this process is controlled. Their presence in the authentication process is based not on a legal requirement, but on the basis of our invitations and letters," said the chief secretary of the Ministry of Electronic Government (MEG).

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