BIRODI Demands Election Forensics and Polling Station Data

The Center for Social Research (BIRODI) asked this morning that results from the upcoming elections be published for every polling station individually and in a machine readable format, arguing that election forensics cannot be applied without it. The statement follows President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic’s announcement that he will resign before the election campaign begins.

The statement went out on the morning of August 7. In it, the organization, whose executive director is Zoran Gavrilovic, separates two questions that keep getting mixed up in public debate: how the resignation announcement should be judged, and how the vote count will be verified once election day is over.

What They’re Actually Asking of the Election Administration

The list of demands in the statement is short and technical:

• complete polling station results in machine readable format
• scanned polling station records, linked to the database
• metadata attached to those files
• a publicly available log of changes
• publication of the data before the deadline for filing appeals expires
• equal and timely access for all citizens, media, organizations and researchers

The last two items carry the most weight, because they turn a general call for transparency into a deadline, and into an obligation that the data cannot reach some parties earlier than others.

What Is Election Forensics?

Election forensics is a set of statistical methods used to determine, from the election data itself, where the risk of irregularities is highest and whether further checks are warranted. It works at the level of the individual polling station, not the municipality or the electoral list, so a summary table published in a format a machine cannot read is useless for that purpose.

BIRODI argues that accepting election results should not depend on trust in statements made by political figures, but on the process being verifiable. The organization also states that only an independent, expert and publicly verifiable analysis of the data can support election integrity, establish the facts, and make the outcome acceptable to all participants.

Article 111 of the Constitution and Article 40 of the Law

On the resignation announcement itself, BIRODI holds that such a move by Vucic would break an existing pattern of violating Article 111 of Serbia’s Constitution, which defines the president as an expression of state unity, and Article 40 of the Law on the Prevention of Corruption, which governs the obligations of public officials. The organization links the same move to the first priority recommendation of ODIHR on separating the state from the ruling party.

BIRODI had earlier called for separating the office of president from party and campaign activity, so it reads the announcement as confirmation of its own demand rather than as a concession.

The Same Pattern as With the Voter Roll

The deadline demand did not appear out of nowhere. In its Needs Assessment Mission report published in late July, following a mission visit to Serbia from July 6 to 10, ODIHR noted that an independent commission had been formed to review the voter roll, but also that opposition parties and civil society organizations doubt the review will produce results before the election, due to delays in accessing the data. More than 6.4 million voters are registered on the voter roll.

BIRODI is now raising the same question about the vote count. Data that arrives after the appeal deadline is technically published, but legally it can no longer change anything, which is why the demand was framed as a deadline rather than a request.

In the same report, ODIHR recommended a full observation mission, with 32 long term and 300 short term observers and a dedicated media monitoring team. It also found that key recommendations from previous election cycles have not been implemented, particularly on preventing the misuse of state resources, protecting voters from pressure and intimidation, overseeing campaign financing, and balanced media coverage. It expects the election to take place in a highly polarized environment, shaped by months of student protests that began after the canopy collapse at the Novi Sad railway station in 2024, which killed 16 people.

The practical consequence of BIRODI’s demand can be measured without any political judgment. If the Republic Election Commission publishes polling station results in a format that cannot be processed by machine, or publishes them after the appeal deadline has passed, the forensic check has nothing left to examine, regardless of who said what before election day.