"We live in a technical environment in which we cannot escape from the machines and any attempt to do so smells like the Middle Ages," commented CEC Deputy Chairman Tsvetozar Tomov.

An election has meaning and significance when people believe in their participation.

If there is mistrust, then we better change the technology, he added.

According to Tomov, one of the main advantages of machine voting is to avoid the subjective factor in counting the ballots.

"However, we also have the means to reduce these risks with ballot voting.

In the parliament, it was rejected to make counting centers, to take the counting outside the sectional commissions.

We should not forget that we are putting the sectional committees in a very difficult situation, which carry out this activity after 14 hours of work, and another option, which in the case of the relatively small sections in Bulgaria, is to shorten the duration of the election day," he added.

According to him, public discussion of the Electoral Code is necessary.

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He also commented that invalid ballots are a bigger problem than forged ballots in our country.

"We have to try to deal with the shortcomings, even though over 90% of the elections are fair," the CEC spokesman said, adding that invalid ballots are a huge problem because their rate is high.

"I'm not saying that there are no election frauds, but the impact of these tricks on the final result is not that great," Tomov said, noting that in most cases the corrected protocols were the result of correcting errors in calculations.

According to him, some of the texts in the Electoral Code need a veto.

Among them is the adopted change to refuse to compare the results of counting receipts with the contents of the protocols.