Bulgaria's Central Election Commission has signed off on the plan for machine voting in the October 25 presidential election, as the law requires it to do.
The commission has told the company Informatsionno Obsluzhvane to issue digital certificates for the voting machines. It will then hand the smart cards carrying these certificates to the company running the machine-voting operation, so it can set up the devices.
The machines will sit in a warehouse in Sofia fitted with alarms and CCTV cameras that record footage. They can move only on the commission's orders, and police will escort them the whole way whenever they're transported.
The plan also sets out how the cryptographic keys will be handled. The machines' source code and setup data go out as compressed files locked with a cryptographic key. Keys for the files holding the source code or the databases change hands in two stages, each one handed over in a sealed envelope by whoever created it.
The keys are built from a password split into three parts. Each commission member supplies one part, writes it down on paper and seals it in an envelope.
A few days earlier, commission chairman Georgi Horozov said that, given the preparations made, he sees no serious risk in machine voting. Paper ballots can be ruled invalid, he added, but machine votes cannot.