We always talk about the electoral roll before the elections, every time with new controversies. One which is always relevant is the large discrepancy between the number of voters and the adult population. Although we’ve heard many recommendations to at least assess the extent of this problem in order to solve it, there has been no revision of the electoral roll so far. Improvements towards increased transparency in recent years have been reversed. In addition, new problems arose related to the exercise of voting rights and equality of votes, which cannot be solved without a transparent electoral roll. It seems that only the publication of the names and addresses of all voters could permanently change the attitude towards the electoral roll, but do we really want that?
A phantom on the roster
A constant source of controversy regarding the electoral roll is the discrepancy between the number of adult citizens and the number of registered voters. This is a well-known regional problem, from the Balkans to Central and Eastern Europe: in countries with similar types of electoral rolls and large population outflows, similar deviations happen. The electoral roll is passive, which means that citizens are not required to register, but are entered by the competent authority based on data from state services and registered residence obtained from the Ministry of the Interior.
Since the connection with the vital records was practically automated a few years ago, the main problem of the electoral roll remains the accuracy of the registered residence of each voter. Not only was there never a clear will on the part of the Government or the Ministry of the Interior to align registered residences with reality, but the amendments to the law from 2022 further compounded the problem when Article 10, which directly links voting rights to residence in the Republic of Serbia, was removed from the law. The impression is that we are now in a new zone and that there is ample room for alternative interpretation of voting rights, but also that the consequences for the electoral roll will be unpredictable.
However, the electoral roll would not be controversial if the problem was only this disproportion between the number of voters and the number of adult citizens. Citizens who do not trust state institutions fill this gap by imagining election abuses, based on individual cases of deceased voters, duplicate entries, or unknown persons registered at certain addresses. Because there will always be such cases, because administrative errors are inevitable, and fictitious residences are virtually unpunishable, and because there is not enough transparency of the electoral roll, one may conclude that the entire “difference” is made up of phantom voters. For decades, political parties have encouraged this perception of abuses, and it has become a tradition for the opposition to accuse the government of using phantom voters, and for the government to defend itself by claiming that the electoral roll is the most up-to-date in history.
The consequence of all this is low public confidence in the accuracy of the electoral roll, which also affects the electoral process. Various polls (2019, 2022) show that more than half of the citizens think that the electoral roll does not contain accurate data, while half of them think that the data is manipulated for electoral gain. Before every election, we see the clear consequences of this decade-long neglect.
So what now?
A sorting out of the electoral roll is long overdue. In 2012, the OSCE recommended that Serbia conduct a comprehensive independent audit of the electoral roll as a priority. This recommendation has been in place ever since, ending with the most recent recommendation from 2022 to the authorities to carry out a full revision of the electoral roll, with full participation of relevant actors, including political parties and civil society. So, this issue was recognized and put on the agenda more than a decade ago. However, it seems that it has slipped down the list, and is now further from being realized than ever.
The closest we came to sorting out the electoral roll was in 2019-2020. At that time, it seemed as if it could be done. Verification is a process in which the degree of compliance of the electoral roll with reality is examined, that is, the scope of the problem is identified, so that in the next phase the authorities could solve it. During the first inter-party dialogue in 2019, it seemed that the government could agree at least to the verification process. A working group was formed, including representatives of institutions, civil society organizations, the academic community and international organizations, with a mandate to develop a methodology for verification.
The Government’s working group adopted a methodology quite quickly, however, after the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Protection of Personal Data expressed concerns, that attempt was stopped. In 2021, the government formed a new working group which included representatives of political parties, but this time without representatives of civil society organizations, universities or international organizations. There was no verification or audit.
Still, several minor changes were made since then, some of which have had a positive effect on the transparency of the register roll, but some which have also had a negative effect. On the one hand, the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government publishes quarterly summary numbers of registered voters by municipality. That’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t say much about what’s happening at the level of polling stations and addresses. Also, a partial publication of the voter list was made, so that it is possible to see the personal names of voters at each polling station. This is more of a neutral change than a positive one, as it does not allow a voter on the list to be linked to an address or to see the number of voters at specific addresses. Such a partial publication of the voter list may even raise more suspicion than it allays.
Finally, since 2022, invitations to vote, which inform voters about their polling place, are not sent to specific addresses of apartments, but follow the postal delivery system. This decreased transparency, opening an avalanche of speculation from citizens who found bundles of unassigned invitations in their buildings with names of voters they do not know and who can’t be linked to any specific apartment. This may be the smallest but most destructive change in the electoral process in recent years, and one which is hard to justify.
Scopes of abuse
Such steps towards reducing the transparency of the electoral roll should worry us, because they enable the expansion of the scope of abuse. Although the electoral roll is not the main place where phantoms operate it is important because it affects whether all citizens of Serbia have the right to vote and whether they have it under the same conditions. I will explain this through two illustrations.
Between the presidential elections in 2017 and the parliamentary elections in 2020, in most cities and municipalities in Serbia the number of voters decreased by about three percent. Among the municipalities with the biggest decline in the number of voters, municipalities in the southeast stood out, such as Babušnica and Ražanj with a decrease of 8.5%, Gadžin Han with 10%, and Crna Trava with 14% fewer voters. However, the municipality that experienced the most dramatic drop in the number of voters was Medveđa, which had 10,600 voters in 2017, and only 6,500 in 2020, i.e. a drop of 38%. Between the 2020 election and the next election in 2022, the number of voters decreased by about two percent in most municipalities and cities. Here, attention was not drawn to municipalities where the number of voters drastically decreased, but on the contrary, those where it increased, contrary to the trend in the rest of the country. Apart from Čajetina, the largest increase in the number of voters in Serbia was recorded in the municipalities of Ljubovija (2%) and Mali Zvornik, as much as 7.5%.
The electoral roll reflects trends that can hardly be explained by demographic processes, but rather by the administrative arbitrariness with which voting rights are granted or revoked. The best explanation for the events in Medveđa is that those citizens probably do not live in Medveđa full-time, but instead live in Kosovo, and therefore had their residency deregistered. On the other hand, Serbian citizens living in Bosnia and Herzegovina are fictitiously registered in Podrinje municipalities. Even if there is no clear consensus on how the voting rights of citizens who don’t live in the country should be regulated, the current situation, in which the rules are not applied equally to everyone, seems the worst possible option.
Another problem that we face today is the fictitious change of residence in order to exercise the right to vote. Electoral tourism was the subject of much attention in the recent elections in Poland and Hungary, where due to the multi-constituency electoral system, a vote can have different weight depending on where it is cast. This year, the context in Serbia, in which elections were arbitrarily called in half of the local self-governments, while the other half will have elections next year, is very encouraging for this type of electoral abuse.
This phenomenon was pointed out in October by Milan Stamatović, in a rather unusual way. Namely, he explained that he is joining SNS because otherwise they could transfer part of the voters to Čajetina and easily win. Stamatović stated that he believes that what SNS is doing is legitimate, and before the 2020 elections he himself invited opposition voters from other municipalities to register and vote in Čajetina. Later, it was publicly pointed out that voters register in Belgrade in this way, as a way of influencing the outcome of the local elections.
But falsely declaring residence for electoral gain is neither legal nor legitimate. It is in conflict with the law on residence, and it could also contain elements of a criminal offense against the right to vote. Electoral tourism is illegitimate because it reduces the value of the vote of those who actually live in the city where elections are held, while it gives “tourists” the opportunity to exercise electoral rights in several different municipalities, thus putting voters in an unequal position. That is why the right to vote in local elections is often limited to those who have been living there for a certain period of time, usually several months. The problem of non-transparency of the electoral roll comes to the fore here, because it makes it impossible to identify and sanction electoral tourists.
***
In my article on the electoral roll from 2017 I referred to Hanlon’s razor, which says that one should not attribute to malice something that can be adequately explained by incompetence. But what if incompetence is a mask for bad intentions? The problems related to the electoral roll have been ignored despite all the indications of harmful consequences. But disorganization and non-transparency make external monitoring and analysis of the process difficult, and makes it easier to commit abuses. After every election process in which the repertoire of abuses is expanded, because no one and nothing prevents them, it becomes harder to believe that the problem is incompetence.
Increasing the transparency of the electoral roll is one of the easiest possible interventions in the electoral process. It could be done through minimal changes such as publishing voters’ initials or their number per household. Further interventions would imply a somewhat more complex independent verification, and actually updating the rolls requires greater resources and a serious dialogue about the interpretation of the real meaning of voting rights in our political community.
However, lately it seems to me more and more necessary that the electoral roll be published in its entirety, including the names and residential addresses of all voters. Perhaps such an opening would have wider consequences for the legal status of housing in Serbia. But to do so, it is necessary to balance the right to protect personal data with the utility of public inspection of the electoral roll. First of all, we need to start a dialogue about this. But that will have to wait for the authorities to say something else about the electoral roll other than that it is more up-to-date than ever.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 20.12.2023.
