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Vladimir Vitkov, Chief ICT Security Expert at Information Services, and Mario Mishev, Application Administrator at the company, presented the platform for video capture and video monitoring of the reporting of the results of the polling station election commissions on election day during the largest Bulgarian conference for free and open source software OpenFest. The 22nd edition of OpenFest aims to promote projects implemented using free and open source software, as well as to be a forum for the exchange of ideas and best practices in the field.
"In less than 2 months, after the decision of the National Assembly to introduce mandatory monitoring of the ballot counting and signing of the protocol after the election day, we managed to build the entire system to accept and make live broadcasts in nearly 12,000 polling stations at the same time," said Vladimir Vitkov. According to him, a huge amount of work has been done during this period, such as supplying the devices, provisioning, building software for the devices and management systems, building the infrastructure, etc.
The platform, which was developed by Information Services, has been working flawlessly for 8 consecutive different elections - 4 national elections, one of which in two rounds and new and partial elections for mayors and municipal counselors. The system stores over 120 TV recordings, both from live broadcast and local recording from the devices. That's more than 21 years of video footage. The results of the last election, which was held on October 27, 2024, showed that over 99.5% of the polling stations were broadcasting live or had a recording of the ballot count. "The engagement and interest of the public was indicative that the project is achieving its goals, namely transparency and the possibility of civil control over one of the most important phases of the electoral process," said Vladimir Vitkov. Through the platform, Information Services provided the technical possibility of video surveillance so that the competent institutions and all people and NGOs could observe in real time, from anywhere on earth, the process of counting the election results. "We continue to upgrade the system, with 8 updates and a number of improvements made to the live recording software alone so far," said Mario Mishev.
The full presentation of the platform for video broadcasting and video recording of election day results can be found on YouTube.