New Voting Machines: What Has Changed and Do They Guarantee the Secrecy of the Vote?

After the legal committee in the National Assembly adopted on second reading a text that removes machine voting and replaces it with devices that scan paper ballots, we are showing it to you now.

The experimental scanning machine is equipped with a touchscreen, a printing device, a scanning device, and is attached to a large urn, into which the ballots fall after being, figuratively speaking, swallowed by the machine. There are some known differences with the other machines, well known, with which we voted until now. The main difference is that we continue to vote on paper here, and not through the screen itself.

It is very important to say that if we try to submit an invalid ballot, the machine will return it to us, it will mark it as invalid, and it is assumed that depending on what methodological guidelines the Central Election Commission will issue, the section election commissions will give us a new ballot. There are also some unknowns here, whether this printer will actually print a second receipt, as it was until now with the machines, or not, but these are things that the legislator still needs to clarify.

BNT: Is the secrecy of the vote guaranteed with this type of device?

Veselin Todorov, "Siela" - the supplier of the current machines: "The moment the ballot is submitted to the machine, the secrecy is guaranteed from then on. As I said, the votes themselves are shuffled after each vote, so that the sequence is lost and, accordingly, the connection between the order of entry of the voter into the section and the order of voting. So this is done in the best possible way. In any case, this machine prevents the possibility for someone after the end of election day, as the Constitutional Court had established, to fill in one person or two, to fill in dozens or hundreds of ballots and to count them through the machine, because it will say that someone voted after the end of election day."

Veselin Todorov, "Siela" - the supplier of the current machines: "The moment the ballot is submitted to the machine, the secrecy is guaranteed from then on. As I said, the votes themselves are shuffled after each vote, so that the sequence is lost and, accordingly, the connection between the order of entry of the voter into the section and the order of voting. So this is done in the best possible way. In any case, this machine prevents the possibility for someone after the end of election day, as the Constitutional Court had established, to fill in one person or two, to fill in dozens or hundreds of ballots and to count them through the machine, because it will say that someone voted after the end of election day."

There are only a few companies in the world that can produce such machines, but none of them keeps such large quantities in stock as we need. You know, the sections in the country and abroad are around 13,000.