MANS will not attend the meeting at the Ministry of the Interior, which refers to the voter list, because following the amendments to the Law, we do not have the basic conditions to control the accuracy of that register which is of key importance for the election process.
The ruling parties amended the Law on Voter List while the entire opposition boycotted the work of the Parliament, without any consultation with the civil sector, interpreting arbitrarily and falsely ODIHR’s recommendations. Instead of reforms, amendments to the law have made it essentially impossible to control the voter list. Namely, everyone who is given access to the voter list does so while being supervised by the Ministry of the Interior, whose work they are supposed to control.
Data on voters can be analysed and compared only and exclusively in the way provided by the Ministry of the Interior through predefined queries that allow users to see only the display of the register. The Ministry of the Interior monitors every activity of users, thus, suspicious cases disappeared as soon as we uploaded them to our screen. In many cases, the documentation submitted as the basis for amending the voter data was completely arbitrary and related to other persons, but after the Ministry of the Interior noted that we had uploaded that data, they would magically disappear.
The ruling parties adopted amendments to the Law on Voter List in order to allegedly meet ODIHR’s recommendation to prevent the misuse of data from the voter list. This recommendation was given because political parties, and predominantly ruling DPS, used excerpts from the voter list to record the so-called safe votes and voters who voted in elections, but also to exert pressure and various forms of vote buying.
The amendments to the law came after MANS discovered thousands of phantoms on the voter list, double enrolled and deceased voters. We also found that thousands of people found it difficult to exercise their right to vote because they were transferred to other polling stations by illegal decisions, thus, many of them did not exercise their right to vote because of that. We pointed out the huge problems in the border municipalities and discovered several cases of persons who do not reside in Montenegro, and who had to be deleted from the voter list a long time ago. We brought in experts from other countries who presented the necessary reforms in detail.
Instead of all this, the amendments to the law limit public control of the voter list, so that only the ruling party, under whose control the Ministry of the Interior is, now has full access to that register.
Due to all that, MANS will not be able to control the voter list before these elections, and we will not attend today’s meeting in the Ministry of the Interior because we do not want to give legitimacy to the practice that enables uncontrolled abuse of the voter list by a captured, party institution.
MANS
