State prosecutors announced they are pressing charges against the head of the State Electoral Commission (SEC) Oliver Derkoski and three of its members, over the purchase of software used for the July 15 “corona elections”. The software, provided by the Duna company whose owner is also being charged, badly malfunctioned on election eve, throwing the outcome into serious doubt and undermining the credibility of the process.

According to the charges, the SEC members failed to determine that Duna does not meet the requirements for the contract, badly evaluated its offer and did not test the software before it was used. The software was paid over 20,000 EUR.

The procedure was fair and transparent. We are charged with having a public bid for contracts. Good luck to this country if we are going to have such investigations, said Derkoski.

Derkoski said that over the past 11 years, another company, iVote, received the contract without a public bid. iVote applied for the 2017 contract as well, but lost to Duna.

SEC said that the software was targeted by an outside hacking attack, as was the main news aggregator Time.mk. Both incidents caused outrage and seriously affected public trust in the electoral process.