(Podgorica, 15 April 2013) – The invitation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP) to inspect the official documentation concerning changes made to the electoral lists is an attempt to hide the irregularities in the voter lists – and in their own work – that have placed the legitimacy of the election results into question.
The Ministry has already violated all the legal deadlines in answering to the 7,000 complaints filed. Furthermore, their delayed responses are also illegal as a result of several factors, including the fact that the subjects of the investigations never signed the reports, the reports contained falsified signatures, hundreds of individuals are registered at a time through a single document, etc.
Today MANS analyzed another set of oversight investigation reports produced by the MUP into irregularities in the Central Electoral List relating to Niksic municipality.
The latest reports from Niksic once again confirm our suspicions that the MUP has not carried out proper oversight investigations into the issue. Instead the MUP is attempting to falsify it oversight investigations in order to hide numerous irregularities in the electoral lists.
Thus, with one act, the MUP was able to reject 290 complaints by claiming that the available documentation has confirms that these voters met the legal criteria for electoral list registration. The MUP should have ruled on all of the submitted complaints through individual acts, that is reports, determining the legitimacy of the registration process using legal rationales.
Such behaviour on the part of the MUP appears additionally unreasonable if one considers that it rejected the complaints filed by incumbent candidate Filip Vujanovic, claiming that he failed to individual sign each of the 7,0000 complaints submitted. Now, this same MUP, claims that it can rule on the status of hundreds of voters through a single document.
Through another individual act, the MUP has rejected another 164 initiatives, because the voters in this case met the legally mandated criteria for removal from the electoral list.
In neither of the above cases did the MUP give a rationale for its rulings, nor provide evidence that would confirm that the proper procedures were followed in the registration and removal of voters from the Electoral List. Failing to provide such legally mandated rationales, their conclusions cannot be taken seriously, nor do they contain sufficient information to indicate whether or not the oversight investigations were properly carried out.
