site.btaContinue the Change Co-leader, IS Elections Processing Company Spar over IS’s Role in Elections

Continue the Change co-leader Assen Vassilev and Information Services (IS), the company which is in charge of processing the elections data from the voting sections in all of Bulgaria’s elections, sparred Monday on IS’s role in the elections. It started with a Nova TV interview with Vassilev on Sunday, when he said that he fears that there may be attempts to sabotage machine voting – and then mentioned the role of IS and its long-serving CEO Ivaylo Filipov.

Vassilev said that he fears “possible manipulations aimed to eliminate voting machines from the elections, make people vote with paper ballots only and end up with 20% of invalid ballots”. He also said that IS controlled the voting machines.

He also said: “When GERB lost the elections in July and November 2021, there was no Electronic Governance Ministry: it was established by the Kiril Petkov government. Then the machines were controlled by Information Services under the management of Ivaylo Filipov, who has been there for ten years now. […] If somebody thought that the machines are being manipulated, remember that the organization that actually handled the elections, is Information Services. The company CEO was appointed by GERB 10 years ago and was never replaced by the caretaker governments of [President Rumen] Radev, or the Cabinets of Kiril Petkov and Nikolay Denkov. The same person organized all these elections.”

IS said that it never did “organization of elections” or “controlled the voting machines”. 

“The elections are not organized by one person and even less by the CEO of Information Services,” said the statement.

It explains that IS never managed or stored the machines, or played any logistical role or technically serviced the voting machines.

As per the Elections Code, IS is only in charge of the organization and technology of computer processing of the data from the constituency voting sections and the Central Election Commission, the statement goes.

Ever since the introduction of machine voting in Bulgaria in 2014, the provider of the voting machines, the software and the technical maintenance and logistical services has been Ciela Norma, IS says.

They conclude that IS has participated in the computer processing of all of the nearly 90 parliamentary, local and presidential elections and national referendums since 2003 and there has never been complaints about the quality of their work.

“Our work is transparent and any error would be easily detectable and visible: all interested organizations and individuals have the opportunity to check the election results entered by our operators during the computer processing and match them with the data from the voting tally sheets from the constituency sections, which are scanned and uploaded on the Central Election Commission website,” IS says.