Although hardly anyone has called the official number of the Kladovo Municipal Election Commission to register for out-of-polling-station voting since Thursday, more than 460 people are currently on the list. In the previous parliamentary elections, around 100,000 people across Serbia registered to vote outside polling stations, accounting for approximately 2.7 percent of all voters who turned out. Among them were deceased individuals and people who did not even know they had been registered. Srđan Berić, a member of the Kladovo Election Commission, suspects that this mechanism is being abused and has reported the case to the police.
Since Thursday, when registration for out-of-polling-station voting began, there have been almost no calls to the municipal administration’s official telephone number during shifts covered by opposition representatives on the election commission, Berić explained to Mašina.
Nevertheless, some members of the election commission who work for the municipality have been bringing in lists of applications on paper, with no clear indication of how they arrived or who submitted them.
When asked about the lists from which they transfer information into the notebook officially used to record voters registered for out-of-polling-station voting, they respond that “people brought them in” and that the applicants had called their private phones, he claims.
They were even told that they were not required to check who was registering voters, but only to enter the information.
He points out that an unknown man once came to the election commission, did not identify himself, and handed over a list containing several voters he had registered for out-of-polling-station voting. Commission members then entered the people on that list into the official records.
Berić says they suspect that people are being registered without their knowledge or consent, even though they may not be interested in voting at all. This would then require the polling board to visit them, potentially putting pressure on them to vote after all.
“We are unable to verify who is registering these individuals”
On Thursday, the list of voters registered for out-of-polling-station voting in Kladovo was closed with 115 people on it, Berić says. By Friday afternoon, when he arrived for his shift, the list contained 425 people, even though, according to him, there had been only three calls to the official landline during the morning.
Meanwhile, he claims, the notebook was being kept by the commission president in another room rather than by the election commission members on duty. This prompted Berić to report the case to the police.
He told the police that he suspected abuse of the mechanism for registering people to vote outside polling stations because there was no evidence that these individuals had actually consented to being registered, that they were eligible to vote, or that there was any reason for them to vote outside a polling station.
“As a member of the Municipal Election Commission, I am obliged to point out that there is a suspicion that the registration process is being abused, that the lists are being compiled somewhere unknown, presumably, and then brought to the local election commission, while we have no way of verifying who is registering these individuals,” Berić said.
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Source: Mašina Foto: ZA Media
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