Milivojevic: Phantom Voters No Longer Decide the Outcome

Democratic Party leader Srdjan Milivojevic said on August 6, in an interview with the Simptom portal, that phantom voters can no longer change Serbia’s election outcome. He tied that assessment to his claim that two thirds of citizens support the students and the student list, adding that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is aware of it too.

The statement came days after the Freedom and Justice Party (SSP) announced that the Interior Ministry (MUP) is refusing to give members of the Voter Roll Review Commission from that party the addresses of 133,134 people who obtained Serbian citizenship between 2020 and 2025. Milivojevic thus became the first to connect two subjects that had run on separate tracks until now: the dispute over the roll’s accuracy and his own reading of the balance of political power ahead of a vote.

What Milivojevic said

The DS leader argues that the 2012 elections were the last free and fair vote in Serbia, and that since then the decisive role has belonged to “vote counters and phantom voters, not voters.” He describes today’s situation differently, insisting that “two thirds of citizens support the students and the student list.”

He explained the delay in calling elections as a sign that the president knows he no longer has majority backing. Asked about possible tensions after the vote, he said he does not expect any, predicting that the ruling party will lose and that “no one will be willing to sacrifice themselves for the regime anymore.”

Milivojevic also addressed Vucic’s remark that, in case of an election defeat, he would “laugh in his opponents’ faces from custody, from prison and from the grave.” He called the statement inappropriate and said the president will have to answer for it before the judiciary.

Why is the voter roll back in the spotlight?

Because the number of newly naturalized citizens runs into the tens of thousands, and their addresses have not been verified even by the body responsible for doing so. The SSP representative on the Voter Roll Review Commission is Ana Gojevac, with Marko Dimic as her deputy, and their request has raised the question of where these people are actually registered.

The party points to cases from 2023:

• around 50 people registered at semi-demolished buildings on Presernova Street
• around 150 at an address on Vlade Mandica Street
• roughly a hundred at an unfinished building on Danijelova Street

SSP says it never received the requested list of addresses and sees that refusal as grounds to doubt the roll’s accuracy.

The math behind the estimate

The Unified Voter Roll holds more than 6.4 million voters. The disputed 133,134 names amount to just over two percent of that total. In elections decided by a margin of a few percentage points, that share is enough to pick the winner. Against a two thirds to one third split, it is not. Milivojevic is betting on the second scenario, and by his logic that is why the roll stops being decisive.

His number sits well above what has actually been measured. A survey by the International Republican Institute (IRI), which we reported on earlier, put support for the student list at 46 percent and named corruption as voters’ top concern. Between that figure and two thirds lies roughly 20 percentage points, the exact range where election nights get decided. If the IRI estimate holds, the roll still matters. If Milivojevic’s does, it does not.

What comes next

No election date has been set, and none appears in any official announcement. Until one is, the Voter Roll Review Commission remains the only body where opposition parties can seek access to the data, and the Interior Ministry the only institution holding it.

For the DS, the arithmetic is straightforward: if the two thirds figure holds up, the roll dispute stops being a reason to concede and becomes an argument for running. For the ruling party, the logic cuts the other way, since every unresolved address record undermines in advance a result that would work in its favor. That is why the fight over the 133,134 names will keep going even after elections are called, whatever share the polls give either side.