Analysis of the electoral register for local elections in Tivat shows that around 100 persons had the right to vote for several years, although they did not have Montenegrin citizenship.
Most of those individuals were never granted our citizenship, while some of them were subsequently registered in the Register of Citizenship and are only now legally in the electoral register.
Based on the electoral register for the elections in Tivat and documents provided by the Ministry of Interior (MoI), MANS Program for Monitoring and Analytics found that at least 65 people were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections in 2009 and 2012 and the presidential elections in 2013, even though they had not had Montenegrin citizenship. After the presidential elections, those individuals were removed from the electoral roll, while the MoI itself stated that they did not have Montenegrin citizenship.
For example, Jovan Kovacevic, who was born in 1919 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, had the right to vote in three electoral cycles at the polling place ‘Donja i Gornja Lastva’ under the voter code 597, although he did not have Montenegrin citizenship. The same goes for Petar Predojevic, born in 1932 in Serbia, who could vote at the polling station ‘Tivat Kalimanj II’ under the voter code 15087, Nada Vrhovac, born in 1939 in Croatia, who could vote at the polling place ‘Tivat – Lamele, St. Blok’ under the code 22535, and Milo Lazovic, born in 1950 in Kosovo, who could use his right to vote at the polling station ‘Tivat – Kalimanj II’ under the voter code 5504.
The analysis had also shown that in parliamentary election 2009 and 2012, the right to vote was granted to 27 individuals, who were not Montenegrin citizens at that time. They acquired the citizenship only later and are now in the electoral role for Tivat elections.
Such an example is Spejtin Sabani, who acquired Montenegrin citizenship in March 2015, but he had had the right to vote in the parliamentary elections in 2009 and 2012.
Documents show that Sabani filed a request for Montenegrin citizenship two years after being registered in the electoral roll for the parliamentary elections held in 2009, i.e. on 19 August 2011.
The procedure was completed on 6 March 2015 when the decision on granting Sabani Montenegrin citizenship was adopted. This way, Spejtin Sabani acquired the right to be legally registered to vote in 2015.
Interesting are also the cases of Olga Nikolic, born in 1963, and Nevena Pinjatic, born in 1976, who had relinquished Montenegrin citizenship, and yet they had the right to vote both in the previous parliamentary and presidential elections.
For each of these cases MANS received documentation from the MoI, which indisputably confirms that around 100 persons from Tivat electoral register had the right to vote for several years, even though they did not have Montenegrin citizenship.
When we consider Tivat electoral register a sample of the central electoral roll of Montenegro, it can be expected that, at the state level, there are at least 5,000 voters without citizenship who had the right to vote in the previous elections. This shows that this, just another form of manipulation with electoral roll, could have had a significant impact on the election results, especially in the presidential elections where the difference between the candidates was only a few thousand votes.
This state of the electoral roll certainly does not contribute to increasing confidence in the electoral process and MANS calls upon all relevant institutions to finally implement the new law and establish accountability for massive abuses of which there is concrete evidence.
This text is created with the support of the European Union and the U.S. Embassy Podgorica. Network for Affirmation of Non-Governmental Sector – MANS is solely responsible for the contents of this article, and the views taken herein shall not in any case be considered as those of the European Union.
