(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, shall introduce the stamps marked “VOTAT” in an envelope which shall be sealed by affixing the control stamp of the polling station. The disappearance of one or several stamps shall be recorded under point i) of the statement of poll set out in Article 49 (1);

b) he/she shall annul the unused ballot papers, by drawing the mark “ANULAT” 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 “ANULAT” shall be affixed once on the respective package and the control stamp shall be affixed once;

c) shall establish the number of the voters registered in the permanent electoral list; it is forbidden, under penalty of law, that these documents contain any deletion, modification or addition; the result of the counting shall be recorded under point a) of the minutes provided by Article 49 paragraph (1);

d) he/she shall establish the number of voters present in the poll by counting the signatures entered on the permanent electoral rolls found at the polling station, and on the tables drawn up according to Article 9. The results shall be registered in the statement of poll under letter b), and under points b1, b2, and b3 of the statement of poll set out in Article 49 paragraph (1);

e) he/she shall unseal the ballot boxes one by one, shall count the ballot papers and shall open the ballot papers one by one; at the opening of each ballot paper, the president shall read out loud the surname and first name of the voted candidate and shall display the ballot paper to those present; the opened ballot papers shall be grouped according to candidates, shall be counted and bound separately; the annulled votes and the validly cast votes for each candidate shall be registered in a separate table by one member of the electoral bureau of the polling station, designated by the president.

(2) There shall be considered null 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 duly approved one, the ballot papers on which the stamp marked “VOTAT” has not been affixed, the ballot papers on which the stamp marked “VOTAT” has been affixed on several quadrilaterals or outside them; the vote shall be valid when, although the affixed stamp marked “VOTAT” exceeds the limits of the quadrilateral, the voter’s choice is obvious, when the ink has been printed on the other side of the sheet on which the stamp marked “VOTAT” has been affixed, as well as when the stamp has been affixed several times in the same quadrilateral or both in the quadrilateral and outside any other quadrilateral; making erasures or overwriting the ballot papers shall not entail the nullity thereof; the null ballot papers shall not be counted as validly cast votes.