Riga, June 9 (LETA) - The head of the Riga election commission, Maris Zviedris, told LETA that the responsible officials ignored the warnings of the election commissions about information technology (IT) problems.

He is surprised that the responsible officials commented on the concerns expressed by several heads of municipal election commissions about problems in the electoral system that "there were no indications that something could go wrong." "I do not understand what else had to happen for there to be indications that the success of the elections was in jeopardy," Zviedris said.

He reminded that the first signals that the electoral system was malfunctioning came in March, when the submission of the lists of candidates for the elections started. Even then, he said, the system "hung" for a shorter or longer period, which indicated that something was not quite right.

The election commissions had asked to test the system in good time, but only received PowerPoint presentations, he said. The electoral system was not ready until the last minute, he assumed.

In the second half of May, the commissions had two conduct two tests of the system, but when they saw that two would not be enough, there was a third round. Not all polling stations were able to connect to the system during the tests.

Zviedris said that the next signals were already present on two of the early voting days. On the first day of early voting, the information on voter turnout could not be submitted to the system in time, while on June 4 the polling stations could not start working because the Electronic Online Register of Voters was not working for a while.

"What else should have happened, besides all of the above, to show early indications that the electoral system was not ready to work?" Zviedris said. He also noted the the Central Election Commission had no understanding of the work of election commissions.

As reported, the counting of votes in the 2025 municipal elections encountered technical problems on Saturday and during the night of Sunday. Problems at polling stations in the face of technical problems also occurred during the week when advance voting took place.

At the moment, an inter-institutional task force has not launched a probe into the problems with the vote counting, as it initially needs to gather all the necessary and available information on what happened, Raivis Kronbergs, director of the State Chancellery, told journalists on Monday after the meeting.

He said that until last week there was "such confidence" that everything would work properly because there was no indication that anything could go wrong.

Kristine Saulite, a spokesperson for the Central Election Commission (CVK), said that "if there had been the slightest indication that the systems were not ready, or that something might not work in some way, then those responsible would have been ready to take the decision to count the votes manually right away".

"We had no indication, so we went ahead with the plan," Saulite said.

The head of the CVK pointed out that all the election results had been confirmed and there was no reason to believe that the results would not be accurate. To ensure the accuracy of the results, there are "several control systems", she said.

As for her responsibilities, Saulite said that she was ready to take full responsibility for what was in her competence, but at the moment they were talking about technical competences, which were not the responsibility of the CVK.