Voting machines will not print a ballot at the 25 October presidential election, only a control receipt, Central Election Commission (CEC) spokeswoman Stoyanka Balova-Tsvetkova said today as she presented a demo version of machine voting.

The CEC is training all regional election commissions (RIKs) working on the presidential vote until 14 October. Balova-Tsvetkova said the CEC will add questions and suggestions from RIK members to its guidelines. "The feedback we get from them matters a lot to us, because we are about to adopt and prepare the guidelines," she told Bulgarian National Radio (BNR).

There will be 200 machines in towns and villages across Bulgaria so people can practise on them. About 2,000 machines already work, and repairs on the rest are on schedule. The first information meeting will be tomorrow at a metro station in Sofia.

Certification of the machines will start soon. Experts will check the hardware and software in a secure setting. Next, the software will be built from trusted code, installed on the devices and given a hash code. The hash code guarantees that nobody can tamper with a device.

Voters can download the "Elections 360 Degrees" mobile app from the CEC website and use it to practise voting on a machine. Members of polling station commissions will get access to eProtocol. The spokeswoman said the app is a digital helper for polling station staff.

Electronic versions of the protocols for both machine and paper voting will soon appear in "Elections 360 Degrees". Balova-Tsvetkova said "the polling station members themselves will be able to test whether the checks work, so on election day it will be easier for them to fill in the original protocol" and record the result.

For the vote abroad, the machines will travel as diplomatic cargo in sealed transport cases.