SSP: Ministry withholds addresses of 130,000 new citizens

Ana Godjevac, who sits on the commission auditing Serbia’s voter registry on behalf of the Freedom and Justice Party (SSP), said on July 28 that the interior ministry has not handed over data showing where people who recently acquired Serbian citizenship registered their residence. She put the figure at roughly 130,000 people, and said the request was filed as part of the commission’s mandate to verify the accuracy of the unified voter register.

The number is not plucked from the air. According to the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration, 133,114 people acquired Serbian citizenship between 2020 and 2025. The commission asked the ministry for the addresses those new citizens listed as their place of residence, along with data on any address carrying an unusually large number of registrations. No answer arrived, Godjevac said.

Why does a registered address decide elections?

In the Serbian system, registering a place of residence is not a formality. It determines which polling station a person votes at and which local ballot they receive, so any mass registration at an address where people do not actually live shifts the arithmetic in a specific municipality. In local races decided by a few hundred votes, that is not a marginal issue.

Godjevac cited the 2023 Belgrade elections, when 154 voters were registered at a single address belonging to Vladimir Mandic. After that vote, opposition parties filed criminal complaints over what they described as phantom voters. Her argument is narrow: nobody disputes anyone’s right to acquire Serbian citizenship under the law, but nobody has the right to register a residence at an address where they do not live.

For the opposition, the refusal to release the data is itself a finding. If there is nothing irregular in the records, Godjevac argues, there is no reason to withhold them from a body created precisely to check the register. The interior ministry has so far issued no public response to the claims, and has not said whether the request was rejected on procedural grounds or over personal data protection.

What the opposition wants before the next vote

The SSP and other opposition parties have proposed legal amendments that would make fictitious residence registrations harder. The measures include auditing disputed addresses, meaning those where the number of registered residents bears no relation to the size of the property, and safeguards protecting the voter register from abuse. The point is to catch suspect registrations before election day rather than to file criminal complaints afterwards, complaints whose outcomes voters rarely learn.

Arguments about the voter register accompany every election cycle in Serbia, but this one turns on a concrete and verifiable data set. Citizenship was granted under the law and recorded, residence registrations sit in the ministry’s database, and the audit commission exists to cross-check exactly those two registers. Until they are matched, the claim about tens of thousands of questionable addresses remains a claim, and the denial remains a denial.

The government has not offered its own figures, nor has it challenged the Commissariat’s data. That reduces the dispute to a question of access rather than a question of who is right, which is an awkward place to begin an election year.

Would publishing aggregate statistics on where new citizens registered, with no personal details attached, settle this dispute or simply open another one?