Politically motivated decision making of the State Election Commission with regard to the biometric ID cards is a final blow to the credibility of this institution and it undermines the electoral process. Moreover, it is a public invitation to ID cards forgery and manipulation of election results.
The opinion given by the SEC yesterday is contrary to the Law on Election of Councilors and Members of Parliament, as the article 80 clearly lays down that the citizen proves his/her identity with the biometric ID card or the passport, and he/she cannot vote in case he/she does not prove his/her identity in such manner. However, the SEC decided to act contrary to the law, making a decision which literally treats such provision as irrelevant, while voting after presenting a non-biometric ID card is acceptable.
Most of the SEC members who took part in the decision making remained silent to the fact that the current Montenegrin ID cards, which are not biometric, are much easier to forge, which may jeopardize the legitimacy of the electoral process.
The process of forming the controversial opinion indicates that the decision is politically motivated and that it was made exclusively by members of the ruling majority via political outvoting. Thus, the decision has undermined the credibility of the State Election Commission and made it clear that the institution’s decisions are politically motivated. Therefore, it is a big question how it can be in charge of legal and unbiased implementation of electoral process and deciding in case of irregularities.
Such decision of the SEC is altogether encouraging forgery of ID cards with the purpose of manipulating the results, as it has shown that the existing system does not guarantee authenticity of documents as the ID cards are not biometric. In that sense, they are much easier to forge than documents containing biometric data.
Election process is defined by the Law on Election of Councilors and Members of Parliament based on the information of the Ministry of Interior that the citizens of Montenegro have biometric ID cards, which are more difficult to forge that documents that do not contain biometric data. The fact that the documents are not biometric, and the SEC approves them as a proof of identity when voting, means that the election process can easily be manipulated with fake IDs. Yet, the law strictly says that the voter identification is made with biometric documents.
In other words, the last SEC’s decision is a direct invitation to abuse and forge documents in order to manipulate the results of elections. Thus, the SEC’s decision is extremely concerning and it undermines trust in electoral process in the part of electronic voter identification, which should be serving as a guarantee of a reliable voter identification.
Vuk Maras
Monitoring Program Director
