Phantom Voters: Two Ministries Stall Audit Commission

The commission auditing Serbia’s unified voter registry has asked the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government and the Ministry of the Interior for data on so-called phantom voters, but the two departments, led by Snezana Paunovic and Ivica Dacic, have so far failed to hand over the requested records. The request concerns citizens absent from the country for 90 to 180 days who are still listed as active voters.

The Law on the Unified Voter Registry sets an eight-day deadline for delivering such information. According to the commission, that deadline has already passed with no response from either ministry. The body was set up to verify the accuracy of the registry ahead of the next electoral cycle, so access to official records is a precondition without which the audit cannot even begin.

What the commission wants from Paunovic and Dacic

The request is straightforward: the commission wants to cross-check residency data against each citizen’s status in the voter registry. The Ministry of Public Administration maintains the registry itself, while the Interior Ministry holds records on registered residence and on entries into and exits from the country. Without those two sources, any check on absent voters remains guesswork.

Marko Dimic, a commission member representing the Freedom and Justice Party, said the ministries are not responding even though the deadline has expired. As an example of disputed entries, he cited a single address on Vladimira Mandica Street, where, he said, more than 150 people are registered. Such a concentration of registrations at one location, the opposition argues, points to fictitious entries that can in practice be used to cast votes.

For now, neither ministry has publicly denied the claims or explained the delay. The offices of Paunovic and Dacic have offered no statement on whether the data will be delivered, or when, leaving the question open just as the audit is meant to enter its operational phase.

Does the silence hide an electoral mechanism?

The opposition reads the lack of a reply as deliberate stalling. Dimic accused Paunovic and Dacic of knowingly protecting phantom voters in order to keep open the possibility of manipulating future elections. By that logic, every fictitiously registered voter is a potential ballot someone else can control on election day.

The government has so far not responded with specific figures. The dispute is over whether this is a technical lag in communication between institutions or a political decision not to open sensitive records to a body that includes opposition members. The distinction matters, because the first case is settled by a single letter, while the second raises a question of trust in the electoral process itself.

The integrity of the voter registry is not a technical detail. It is the basis on which the legitimacy of every election result is measured, so each unanswered question about absent and fictitiously registered voters lands on the institutions that stay silent. The deadline has passed, and there is no answer.

Do you think the ministries will eventually deliver the data, or will the registry audit stay blocked right up to the elections?