For the municipal elections on 4 October, the Central Election Commission [CEC] of Georgia is once again conducting an audit of the compliance of electoral technologies. Audit is being carried out by the electoral technology testing laboratory, ‘Pro V&V,’ which has extensive experience in the US and is one of only two companies in the country accredited by the relevant U.S. institutions.

The election administration considers it highly important that, through the repeated conduct of the compliance audit, international best practices are considered and the public is provided with comprehensive information regarding the operational principles, security, and highest standards of protection of the electronic voting systems. At the same time, the implementation of this process further demonstrates that upholding high standards of transparency and accountability remains one of the key priorities of the election administration.

The first two stages of the compliance audit have already been completed. Accordingly, given the high level of public interest, we present information regarding the two stages conducted. Specifically, the audit of the source code and configuration has established that:

---The CEC has successfully carried out the procedures for configuring the devices required for the elections, utilizing methods previously employed during pilot tests and nationwide elections;
---The CEC has successfully implemented a program for monitoring the quality of the configuration process;
---The preparatory processes, procedures, and checks required for conducting the elections were appropriate, and the personnel were well trained;
---In the voter list, no voter identification numbers are duplicated, and each voter is entered only once.”
---The voter lists on the CEC’s servers are consistent with the lists loaded into the devices;

Minor modifications were made to the source code of the verification device, and none of these changes violate electoral legislation or adversely affect the integrity, reliability, or security of the electoral system”.

It should also be noted that the compliance audit is conducted in 3 phases:

---The first phase involved examining the changes made to the source code of the electronic technologies and assessing their compliance with Georgian legislation, and testing the functionality of the updated software.
---The second phase involved the direct observation by representatives of ‘Pro V&V’ of the preparation process of the electronic devices for the elections at the CEC’s operational and storage facility. This phase also included verifying the consistency between the voter lists on the CEC servers and the lists entered into the devices.
---The third phase involves the observation by representatives of ‘Pro V&V’ of the operation of the devices on the day of the election.

The election administration will make the results of the third phase available to the public immediately upon the completion of the compliance audit.