site.btaDemo Held of Machine Voting for May 26 European Parliament Elections

May 16 (BTA) - The 3,300 voting machines to be used in
some of the polling stations at the May 26 elections for
Bulgarian representatives in the European Parliament have been
delivered and are in storage in Sofia, Vesselin Todorov,
Executive Director of Ciela Norma, which won the public
procurement for the voting machines, told a briefing in the
Central Election Commission (CEC) on Thursday. The Interior
Ministry has made the necessary arrangements for the safekeeping
 of the machines. The machines are with updated software and in
full compliance with the requirements of the Election Code. They
 are with a new design, made specifically for Bulgaria earlier
this year, in Taiwan, Todorov said.

Erhan Chaoushev, who is in charge of machine voting in CEC, said
 that the machine voting at the May 26 elections will be to high
 security and reliability standards. Subsequent checks will be
performed to streamline the process for the next time of machine
 voting, Chaoushev said.

CEC Spokesman Alexander Andreev said that in terms of
organization and conducting the elections, everything will
proceed normally "which is evident and public".

Stefan Mitkov from Ciela Norma demonstrated how voting will be
done with the machines. This will take place with a plastic
smart card which is placed in the machine's reader. Each
district election commission will have three such cards, to
avoid voting by the same card by two voters in succession. A
receipt will be printed by the machine showing the party for
which the voter voted and his/her preferred candidate, if
selected. The receipt will then be folded and put in a ballot
box which is separate from the ballot box holding the ordinary
paper ballots. The machine voting is completed in under 60
seconds.  IG/ZH