News

The Public Council at CEC calls upon improving the technology to verify signatures
The Public Council at CEC calls upon improving the technology to verify signatures

At its meeting on April 15, 2014, the Public Council at CEC discussed the problematic aspects in implementing the new provision of the Electoral Code, according to which every citizen can verify, through his/her PIN, whether his/her name appears on a petition for any registration of a party, coalition or initiative committee.

The members of the Public Council, including ISI, consider that checking the presence in a list must remain but with a condition for the improvement of the technology, and the introduction of a secondary protection of Personal Data. The proposal to CEC is to discuss and add some of the following additional features:

1. Upon filling in the data to be verified, the person should be asked to enter an e-mail too, where a confirmation link would be sent. Within this suggestion, there is also an option to limit the possibility for a check to a single one;

2 . Another option is to send an arbitrarily long code with the e-mail, which should be entered at any re-check of the same PIN. The MD5 code may be temporarily or permanently (until the end of the elections) associated with the e-mail, which will prevent the possibility of checking multiple PINs with the same e-mail.

3 . A more expensive (for the operators and the government) possibility is to receive an SMS with a code to be entered in order to do the check. However, this would require the willingness of the verifier to provide his/her mobile number; then the MD5 code, described above, can also be used to limit the possibility of checking more than one PINs.

The Public Council already has a separate section on the CEC website, which, at the moment, presents only the working rules of the Board.