(1) After the closing of the voting room, the president, in the presence of the members of the electoral bureau, shall perform the operations of ballot paper counting and recording of the voting result, as follows:

a) he/she shall check the state of the seals on the ballot boxes, shall seal the slit of the ballot boxes, and shall introduce the stamps marked “VOTED” into an envelope which will be sealed by affixing the control stamp of the polling station. The disappearance of one or several stamps shall be recorded at point i) of the statement of the vote provided for in Art. 49 paragraph (1);

b) he/she shall reject the unused ballot papers, by writing down “REJECTED” across the first page and by affixing the control stamp of the polling station; in the event there are intact packages with ballot papers, the mark “REJECTED” shall be written down only once on the respective package, and the control seal shall be affixed once;

c) he/she shall establish the number of voters included on the copy of the permanent electoral roll; it shall be forbidden, except as provided by art. 44 paragraph (6), under the sanction of the law that the rolls contain erasures, alterations or completions; the counting result shall be written down at point a) of the statement of the vote provided for in Art. 49 paragraph (1);

d) he/she shall establish the number of voters present in the voting by counting the signatures entered on the copies of the electoral rolls at the polling station, and on the tables drawn up according to Art. 9, respectively. The results shall be registered in the statement of the vote at point b), and points b1, b2, and b3, respectively, of the statement of the vote provided for in Art. 49 paragraph (1);

e) he/she shall unseal the ballot boxes one by one, shall count the ballot papers, and shall open the ballot boxes one by one; when opening each ballot paper, the president shall read aloud the full name of the voted candidate, and shall show the ballot paper to the people present; the opened ballot papers shall be arranged per candidates, shall be counted and tied separately; the rejected votes and the validly cast votes for each candidate shall be recorded in a separate table each by one member each of the electoral bureau of the polling station appointed by the president.

(2) There shall be considered rejected the ballot papers on which the control stamp of the polling station has not been affixed, the ballot papers with a different model than the legally approved one, the ballot papers on which the stamp marked “VOTED” has not been affixed, the ballot papers on which the stamp marked “VOTED” has been affixed on several quadrilaterals or outside them; the vote shall be validly cast when, although the affixed stamp marked “VOTED exceeds the limits of the quadrilateral, the voter’s choice is obvious, when the ink has penetrated the other side of the sheet on which the stamp marked “VOTED” has been affixed, as well as when the stamp has been affixed several times on the same quadrilateral or both inside and outside any other quadrilateral; erasures and writing on the already existing lines of the ballot papers shall not incur the rejection thereof; the rejected ballot papers shall not be counted as the validly cast votes.