The State Election Commission and its president, Budimir Saranovic, have been ignoring requests for opinion on implementation of the law on election of councilors and members of parliament submitted by MANS for more than five months. By doing so, they are making space to the abuse of citizens’ right to vote and vote rigging.
On 1 March 2016, MANS requested the SEC to give an opinion on the implementation of provisions of by-laws of the institutions which are contrary to the Law on Election of Councilors and Members of Parliament and which enable voters whose photographs do not exist in the system of the Ministry of Interior, or in electoral register, to vote, despite the fact that the Law on Election of Councilors and Members of Parliament forbids it.
According to the current legislation, the electoral register is closed ten days before the elections, after which the voters’ data from the closed electoral register, together with voters’ photograph, are loaded into electronic voter identification devices. Therefore, all the citizens that acquire new, biometric documents within the said ten days, will not have their photographs loaded into the electronic voter identification device, which is, according to the law, one of the prerequisites of proper voter’s identification.
At this moment, the number of citizens that do not have new biometric documents, and thus their photographs are not loaded into the database of the Ministry of Interior, is over ten thousand.
Yet, instead of ensuring the full implementation of the law, in the Rules of work of polling committees the SEC prescribed a procedure that enables persons whose photographs are not in the electronic identification system to vote. Thus, the SEC has enacted a by-law which is in a direct contradiction with the Law on Election of Councilors and Members of Parliament, which lays down that a voter must be electronically identified in order to vote and that the electronic voter identification device must contain a photograph of the voter taken from the register of personal IDs or passports (article 68a, pp. 1-4).
By acting in such manner, the SEC has created space for abuse of the right to vote, as thousands of people that acquired new documents within ten days before the elections and after the electoral register is closed, may appear at polling stations, although the electronic voter identification device cannot fully identify them. Thus, the SEC has not only allowed massive manipulation with personal IDs, but also completely stultify the use of the electronic voter identification device, the primary use of which is preventing phantom voting, deceased people voting or double voting.
For that reason, as soon as the disputable Rules on Work of the Polling Committees were passed, MANS requested the SEC to give an opinion with regard to those issues and therefore enabled them to change the rules, to align them with the law and prevent any potential vote rigging that they had previously made possible. However, it is apparent that the SEC and its president, Budimir Saranovic, never intended to align their work and the legal framework with the law, which is why they have been ignoring the MANS’s request for more than five months.
We urge the SEC and its president, Budimir Saranovic, to act on the MANS’s request with regard to the opinion on the implementation of the Law on Election of Councilors and Members of Parliament and ensure that not a single person in Montenegro can vote contrary to the law.
Vuk Maras
Monitoring Program Director
