site.btaE-Government Minister: State Is Implementing All Necessary Measures to Ensure Protection of Citizens' Votes

Caretaker Electonic Governance Minister Valentin Mundrov said at a briefing in the Council of Ministers that the State has taken and is implementing all the necessary measures to guarantee the protection of citizens' votes in the upcoming early elections on October 27.

Mundrov explained that this includes the technical security and strict control of the entire process of authentication of the voting machines. Both currently and since the beginning of the authentication process, every single citizen can monitor this entire authentication process at the Ministry of Electonic Governance, the Minister said. He stressed that no compromises will be made regarding the security and publicity of machine voting.

Mundrov pointed out that what is different from the previous elections is that the methodology for the inclusion of the parameterizing software in the verification has been updated in order to ensure greater security during the corresponding authentication. This is regarding software that configures the machines in terms of candidate-MP lists and preferences for each section election commission, explained Mundrov. He stressed that such an inspection has not been done so far. "I have been assured by the teams working in the Ministry of Electonic Governance, the Bulgarian Institute for Standardization and in the Bulgarian Institute of Metrology that the certification process is going according to plan and is expected to be completed on Friday," the Minister said.

He added that on Tuesday the Central Election Commission issued a decision ordering a procedure to sufficiently secure executable code. This Minister invited the media to attend the upcoming event on Friday, which will be held in a controlled environment but also in public, in order to prove that the machines cannot be manipulated and the vote of the citizens cannot be manipulated through them.