From the last local elections up until completion of the voters list, data on almost half of the voters have been changed for the upcoming local elections in 11 municipalities, while the ruling majority in the Parliament amended the law and limited the possibility of controlling the voters list.
Namely, from the last local elections in these municipalities in 2014 to date, the Ministry of Interior has made 134,162 changes in the electoral list, which includes 320,165 voters. This means that the data for almost half of the voters, who will elect councillors on Sunday, are changed. In relation to the number of voters registered, most changes were in the City Municipality of Golubovci – 89%, followed by Tuzi 57% and Kolašin 53%, while least changes were in Rožaje 16%.
Out of the total number of changes, 74 thousand, or 55%, refer to changes in the polling station of citizens who did not change their address or residence. Only in Podgorica 48 thousand changes were made on this basis.
In practice, this may mean that a significant 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 many problems 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 own polling station, thus cannot instruct the citizens where they are to vote; only municipal election commissions can give them such information. This can create particularly great problems for those voters who vote in rural areas, that is, parts of the town that are away from the premises of the municipal election commissions.
Due to amendments to the Law on Voters List adopted at the end of last year, MANS no longer has the ability to thoroughly check and compare data 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 were able to perform during previous election cycles, when a complete voters list was available, we can now check only case by case. This is theoretically unfeasible for such a large number of changes, especially since we have access to the voters list only for a limited period of time, from the day of calling to the day of the election.
Also, the new legal solution limited the ability to analyze data according to parameters we previously used, when we found a number of phantoms, including deceased, double-entered voters, unreasonably deleted, and so on. Now, we only have access to data through software of the Ministry of Interior, which makes a quality search more difficult. Thus, according to such decision, control of the voters list, as well as the work of the Ministry itself makes no sense.
Due to all this, we are waiting for Sunday’s elections with a voters list which cannot be checked by any independent institution, which is a continuation of decline of trust in the entire electoral process.
Danilo Kalezić
Coordinator of the Parliamentary Programme
