(Podgorica, 24 April 2013) – Montenegro cannot allow another election to pass in which the voter lists contain numerous irregularities, since this would mean a deeper political crisis than the one we find ourselves in today. For this reason, we call upon the Ministry of Information Society and Telecommunicaitons (MIDT) to immediately correct the numerous irregularities that evidently exist in the Central Electoral List (CEL). We also call upon the MIDT to initiate amendments to the Law on Electoral Lists in order to enable the more transparent management of the CEL in accordance with international recommendations.
The MIDT’s statement that MANS incorrectly calculated the tabular data on changes to the voter list represents a brutal manipulation by the Ministry. We based our calculations on official data release by the MIDT. The MIDT’s tabular data was released in the government-run daily Pobjeda, listing changes to the CEL. The chart compared information from the parliamentary elections held on 14 October 2012, with the situation in 19 January 2013 and on 28 March 2013 as well. By comparing the MIDT’s own data, MANS was able to conclude that changes were made to the status of 25,000 voters in three categories.
Similarly, the statement that the tabular data for the electoral lists for local and state elections cannot be compared, represents yet another attempt by the MIDT to manipulate the public. Such a statement also illustrates the MIDT’s lack of familiarity with the laws regulating voter lists. THat is, the Law on Electoral Lists clearly stipulates that the electoral list is “constant and routinely updated,’ meaning that the information released by the MIDT must be comparable.
Until now, MANS has only brought forward concrete examples of manipulation surrounding the electoral lists and some of these were already confirmed by the MUP’s oversight investigations. Thus, the MIDT’s claim that we’re the one’s ‘manipulating’ information about deceased voters does not stand. Numerous examples exist that it is the MIDT itself that is manipulating the public, which has been proven countless times by MANS until now. The available data clearly point to various illegalities in the management of the voter lists and the CEL.
For this reason we are once again calling on the MIDT to correct all of the CEL irregularities and to implement their legal obligations. We believe that the MIDT, not to mention Montenegro’s citizens, will benefit if the Ministry begins correcting the serious errors in the CEL, instead of leading a campaign attempting to defend the existing voter lists. IN the past several months we’ve clearly proven the existence of tens-of-thousands of errors in the voter lists, including the existence of clone and phantom voters, deceased voters, those illegally registered as well as those illegally removed from the CEL. If the MIDT began doing its job correctly, instead of attempting unsuccessfully to spin its data to the public, the conditions for democratizing elections would be created. This would help avoid another, even greater, political crisis than the current crisis in the state. The MIDT must be held to account for its role in the current crisis.
In the end, the only truth that the MIDT brought forward in its reaction was the fact that MANS doesn’t have the right to examine the changes in the voter lists, since this is a right reserved only for political parties. For this reason, we call upon the MIDT to propose amendments to the current Law on Electoral Lists, in order to enable NGOs to access this information and provide additional oversight into the voter lists. This would improve the transparency of the entire electoral process, fulfill the recommendations of all relevant international organizations, including the ODIHR. The international community is calling for more transparent methods in managing voter lists in order to restore the faith of citizens in the accuracy of the lists. In this way, state institutions would also obtain a watchdog, which is clearly necessary, in order to ensure the reduction of voter list manipulations and to help remove the tens-of-thousands of irregularities that have been uncovered to date.
