There has been a large number of changes in the voter’s list for the presidential elections regarding voter’s data which cannot be properly verified due to new legal solutions that limit the possibility of controlling the electoral process.
Namely, from the last presidential elections to this date, the Ministry of the Interior has made 211,552 changes in the voter’s list, which now has a total of 533,113 registered voters.
Over 100 thousand amendments refer to changes of the polling stations for citizens who did not change their address or residence.
This means that a large number of citizens will vote in other polling stations, even though they have not changed their place of residence. Because of that, there may be numerous issues on the election day, because voters will not know where they can vote. This can be particularly problematic because the polling boards have only data on voters from their polling station, and cannot instruct the citizens where to vote, such information can only be given by municipal election commissions. In particular, this can create great problems for those voters who vote in rural areas or in parts of the town far from the premises of the municipal election commissions.
There is a particularly suspicious number of voters who have been registered for the first time in the voter’s list based on becoming adult. Namely, from the previous presidential elections until the parliamentary elections, i.e. in 3,5 years, on this basis, 14.5 thousand voters were registered. However, in a twice shorter time period, from the parliamentary elections to this date i.e. 1.5 years, as many as 12.4 thousand voters have been registered. Such data suggests that in the period from 1998 to 2000, there was a double increase in birth rates in relation to the previous period, for which there is no reasonable explanation, nor foundations in the official statistical data.
Due to the amendments to the Law on voter’s list adopted at the end of last year, MANS is not able to verify and compare data in the way we did in the previous period, when we detected tens of thousands of abuses.
Instead of automated verification of a large number of data that we could carry out for previous elections, when a complete voter’s list was available, we can now check only one case at a time. It is theoretically unfeasible for such a large number of changes, especially since we have access to the voter’s list only for a limited period of time, from the day of calling of the elections to the very day of elections.
Also, the new legal solution limited the ability to analyze data according to parameters we previously worked by, when we found a number of phantoms, including deceased, double-entered voters, unreasonably deleted, and so on. Now we can check the data only as determined by the MoI, i.e. we can control the work of that Ministry only in a way that the Ministry allows us. This makes the control of the voter list absurd, as well as the work of the Ministry itself.
Due to all this, we are heading towards the presidential elections with a voter’s list which cannot be checked by any independent institution, which is a big step backwards compared to the previous period and contributes to a further decline of trust in the election process.
MANS
