„On Friday at the end of the day, after we did the trusted build, the three institutions - BIM, the Bulgarian Institute for Standardization and the Ministry of e-Government, issued a decision certifying that the machines are suitable for the elections on October 27. From now on, I think this is a guarantee that there will be machine voting.
This was commented to NOVA by the Minister of e-Government, Valentin Mundrov.
Regarding the information that 9,600 out of 12,000 voting machines are out of date, the minister explained that this is not a problem. “I will give an example from home, most of the appliances have expired, but I take care and I will continue to use these electrical appliances. There is no problem to assume defects, there are such possibilities, but let's say that this does not create a problem”, said Mundrov.
E-governance minister: 9,600 voting machines out of warranty
„The Central Electoral Commission carries out prevention and diagnostics of each of the machines. With these activities, they meet the manufacturer's requirements. This ensures that the machine will not be damaged, said Mundrov and emphasized that all 9,353 machines that will work in the upcoming elections, as well as the other 157 outside Bulgaria, will undergo diagnostics.
„When the voting machines are used properly, there shouldn't be any problem,” he added.
On the monitoring of the elections, the minister specified: “There may be places where the internet will not be strong enough for video surveillance, but what happens after that is that the recording is uploaded to the same platform”.
In his words, the state, in the person of the MEU and the institutions, are prepared in case of possible cyber security attacks.