AFTER BEING EXPELLED FROM SPS, AN OPEN QUESTION REMAINS: Could Branko Ružić reveal how voter rolls were manipulated?

Branko Ružić, former vice-president of the Socialist Party of Serbia, in his first reaction to the decision to expel him from the party, also addressed the broader state of society.

The now-former Socialist Party member, who served in several governments on behalf of the party and headed several different ministries, stressed that Serbia needs independent institutions, prosecutors who can prosecute, judges who can pass rulings, and police officers who enforce the law without political permission, as well as that the fight against corruption must apply to everyone, regardless of position or party membership.

“Serbia must listen to its youth much more seriously. Young people have the right to be dissatisfied, to ask questions, to protest and to demand accountability from us. Their job is not to be obedient to politicians. Our job is to leave them a country in which they will want to live, work, start families and believe that knowledge and honest work can lead to progress,” Ružić pointed out.

What could the former minister of public administration say?

Following this statement, part of the public came forward with the idea that the former prominent official of the ruling coalition could, in practice, demonstrate his commitment to independent institutions and the rule of law. Namely, Ružić served as minister of public administration and local self-government from 2017 to 2020, a ministry responsible for maintaining the Unified Voter Register.

The voter register is one of the most controversial elements of Serbia’s electoral process, while domestic and international observer missions have for years identified it as a key source of systemic irregularities. Failures in maintaining and updating the Unified Voter Register have proven to be a broad field for manipulation by the authorities during the electoral process. The most prominent problem is certainly the registration of large numbers of voters at addresses where they do not actually live, which has been recognized publicly as a key element of the “electoral engineering” of Aleksandar Vučić’s government.

In this context, the question arises as to whether Ružić, as someone who headed the ministry responsible for the voter register, will demonstrate his commitment to independent and democratic institutions by informing the public about irregularities and manipulation by the authorities in this area.

Ružić himself did not respond to Nova.rs’s question about whether, as someone who was part of the system, he was prepared to speak about the abuses taking place within it, while opposition politicians dealing with this issue are skeptical that this could happen.

“Zorana Mihajlović also waved the voter lists around, then fell silent”

Zoran Alimpić of the Democratic Party, who is also a member of the Belgrade City Electoral Commission, reminded Nova.rs that there have previously been cases where a minister or female minister from Vučić’s government remembered fraud and irregularities in the voter register only after falling out of favor.

“Three years ago, Zorana Mihajlović showed lists at a press conference containing tens of thousands of illegally newly registered voters from the Republic of Srpska. What happened? The institutions that were supposed to react remained silent, and the lady went from being out of favor back into favor and forgot about the irregularities,” he explained.

Alimpić agrees that Ružić, if he truly claims to support free institutions, could demonstrate this in practice by informing the public about manipulation related to the voter register.

“He could, if he wanted to. But there are two problems. One is that he might accuse himself as well, and the other is that he would antagonize the criminals in power too much, and for that you have to be very brave,” Alimpić said.

However, he added that the citizens of Serbia cannot rely on such witnesses, but only on themselves and their determination and resolve.

“An action with a controller in every village and observers at every polling station will protect at least part of the electoral process from the theft that is inevitable,” Alimpić believes.

“No minister since 2012 has done anything”

Ognjen Rašuo, who is a member of the Voter Register Review Commission on behalf of the Green-Left Front, believes that Ružić, as well as every other minister of public administration since 2012, has done nothing to organize and improve the voter register.

“They inherited a voter register that was created in such a way that it necessarily needed to be organized and changed over time. But they simply maintained it in the state in which they found it, without making any interventions. In this way, they allowed irregularities to accumulate and be abused,” Rašuo explained to Nova.rs.

The Unified Voter Register was created by merging individual voter registers maintained by municipal and city administrations, shortly before the 2012 elections.

“It should have been regularly updated, changed and any problems that emerged should have been resolved. All ministers since 2012 have neglected this, and by failing to resolve the problem, they allowed greater opportunities for manipulation during the electoral process,” Rašuo concluded.