site.btaScanned Voting Tally Sheets to Be Digitally Stamped to Avoid Manipulation

Scanned tally sheets will be stamped electronically to avoid manipulation of the voting results, Information Services (Bulgaria’s national system integrator) CEO Ivaylo Filipov told journalists Wednesday.

The company presented at the Central Election Commission (CEC) the software for processing the voting results for the upcoming early parliamentary vote on October 27.

“The seal is digitally applied on the document. It will not be visible on the tally sheet itself because it is not part of it. When you open it with the relevant programme, it shows that it is digitally stamped and you can see who issued the stamp and whether it is legal,” Filipov explained, adding that the provisions of the Election Code guarantee that votes will not be tampered with.

Regarding video surveillance, Filipov said that over 100 additional CCTV devices and over 300 chargers have been procured, which will alert if the battery is dropping or the device is misplaced. “The moment the battery drops to a certain percentage, the device starts talking, reminding the members of the polling station committee to plug it into the power cord and continue broadcasting, as well as when it is placed incorrectly,” Filipov said. He reported that there are a growing number of section election commissions that are broadcasting in real time. “We have about 300 sections, less than 2%, which for understandable reasons, such as hard-to-reach regions, do not broadcast,” he added.

Filipov explained that any tally sheets that are scanned and recorded in the appropriate format can be downloaded to a personal computer by anyone and processed to mislead the public. “To this end, together with the CEC, we have looked at options to digitally stamp samples of the polling station tally sheets so as to give the citizens another reason to be confident that the State, in the person of the CEC, is doing its job,” he said, noting that under the Election Code the data that comes into the computer centres of the company must already be made public.

“We believe that with the electronic seal that has been issued for each of the regional election commissions (REC) - up to 32 including those overseas - each report will be stamped,” Filipov said. He pointed out that this is another level of security in case someone decides to modify the document and display it publicly. The original tally sheets, with the stamp for a given REC, will be posted on that REC's website.