There are already grounds for prosecutors to start forming cases considering the number of reported irregularities and abuses of personal data in the registration process for voters abroad in Bosnia’s 2020 local election, member of the Central Election Commission (CEC), Ahmed Santic, said on Thursday.
Santic said that the CEC had already requested a meeting with Bosnia’s Prosecutor’s Office months ago to discuss potential manipulations in the 2020 local election process, especially regarding voters registered abroad, but that such a meeting did not take place so far.
RELATED NEWS
Santic’s statements come after the CEC decided to publish the list of registered voters abroad on its website for the first time ever at a session at the beginning of October.
On Tuesday, the CEC said that it came to the decision in light of numerous complaints about irregularities concerning the voter registration process in previous elections.
The institution also said it received an enormous number of complaints concerning irregularities in voting from abroad since the list was published and that it managed to review each one of them and took 27.960 names from the list so far.
There are 101,771 people registered as voting from abroad in the 2020 local election, which is to take place on November 15.
In the previous election in 2018, there were 77,814 names on that list.
“Every day when we receive certain reports regarding forms for voting by mail, our legal obligation is to send the complete lists to the competent prosecutor’s office if we determine that there are grounds for criminal responsibility,” Santic said.
He expressed hope that all prosecutors’ offices and agencies in the country will get seriously involved in the election process and argued that there are already enough elements of potential criminal behaviour for prosecutors to take action.
“It’s the obligation of political parties to animate as many voters as possible for their programs and, of course, this includes voters who vote by mail. But it is truly indicative that we have an increased number of voters in this election,” he said.
Santic said that he believes that certain groups have abused an opportunity to obtain personal documents of voters and are simply using their right to vote.
“The problem for us is how to determine the authenticity and credibility of all these applications when you have cases of addresses where up to 20 people live, and a bakery or a butcher's shop is at that address,” he said.
