The Anti-Corruption Fund (ACF) referred the case to the Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office (SCP) over computer crimes committed in the election of six judges to the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) last June.
The manipulation of the electronic voting system first became public knowledge in „Kapital” newspaper article in January. It quotes the findings of a triple computer-technical expert report in the case, initiated after three of the candidates for members of the SJC filed complaints challenging the election results. These are Judges Atanas Atanasov, Vladimir Valkov and Tatyana Zhilova, as well as Judge from Lukovit Vladislava Tsarigradska, who nominated a candidate for a member of the Council.
In spite of the information about serious manipulations, which was announced 6 months ago, there is no information that the Prosecutor’s Office has initiated an investigation.
The expert report in the case, accepted in the course of the proceedings without being challenged, identified „various anomalies“ in the use of the e-voting system: multiple votes from the same IP address; IP addresses from which votes were cast dozens of times; consecutive voting with different voters’ slips. In all these cases, voting was done from IP addresses belonging to courts, although the system allows judges to vote from their mobile phones and home computers.
The most shocking is the case where about 200 votes were cast within 3 minutes in the morning hours on Saturday /25.06.2022/, from the same IP address of the Supreme Administrative Court.
The data from the expert report is complemented by reports of judges being unable to exercise their right to vote on election day because electronic voting had already been done from their account. For example, Judge Tanka Tsoneva of Sofia District Court reported an inability to vote using the link and password provided to her. A check of the alert revealed that Judge Tsoneva’s ticket had already been used to vote, apparently by someone other than her.
„The computer expertise and the collected written data pointed to the conclusion that an unauthorized person had illegally accessed the system and used someone else’s data for access when exercising the right to vote,“, Andrey Yankulov, senior legal advisor to the ACF, said.
It was also found that several intermediate backups of the different databases of the information system were made during the election day, including the voting results tables.
This is a violation of the rules for electronic voting and in practice means that the secrecy of the vote was not protected, and people who had full access to the system could find out which judge voted for which candidate.
Despite the reported data on significant violations and manipulations of the vote, in February 2023 a five-member mixed panel of judges from the Supreme Court of Cassation and the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that „the election of the six members of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) from the judicial quota is legal and valid, there are no established violations of such a degree that he is depraved.“
„We believe that the data presented in our report to the Prosecutor’s Office are sufficient to initiate criminal proceedings,“, Director of the Anti-Corruption Fund, Boyko Stankushev said.
„The data in the report raise doubts about serious violations and manipulations that potentially changed the results of the selection of judges for members of the Supreme Judicial Council. The issue is of high public importance, but until now there is no adequate institutional response. Therefore, we are sending a deliberate signal and will inform the public about its results in due course,”, he added.
