Beograd Ostaje Asks ODIHR for Voter Roll Review Before Vote
Civic initiative Beograd Ostaje has asked the OSCE's ODIHR office for an urgent review of Serbia's voter roll before elections are called, citing about 130,000 newly naturalized citizens.
The civic initiative Beograd Ostaje sent an open letter today, August 27, to the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), asking the organization to press Serbian institutions into reviewing the voter roll before elections are officially called. The story was first reported by nova.rs at 12:19 p.m., and the letter was carried the same day by Masina.
The letter states that the Committee for Voter Roll Oversight and Review still lacks any real ability to carry out full checks, since its members do not have access to all the data needed to verify the roll’s accuracy. Similar evidence has previously been submitted to ODIHR by the Party of Freedom and Justice, but Beograd Ostaje is the first civic, rather than party, organization to write to the Warsaw office.
What the initiative is asking for
The letter’s central claim concerns the number of newly registered citizens:
“The Committee for Voter Roll Oversight and Review still lacks any real ability to carry out full checks. Its members do not have access to all the data needed to verify the roll’s accuracy, while at the same time roughly 130,000 newly registered voters have acquired Serbian citizenship, and the public has no way of checking where they are or whether they are genuinely registered.”
The initiative says the problem isn’t merely technical: it claims that during previous elections, voters, including some from neighboring countries, were moved en masse in order to sway the outcome. Beograd Ostaje says it has spent the past year investigating so-called phantom voters and nonexistent addresses in several Serbian cities, and describes the letter as a summary of that work.
The letter lists four specific demands addressed to ODIHR:
- immediately unblock the work of the Committee for Voter Roll Oversight and Review
- grant Committee members full access to the underlying data
- open all legal and technical tools to expert organizations and citizens
- carry out an independent review of the voter roll before new elections are called
Why the letter appeals specifically to ODIHR
The initiative’s letter recalls that both the European Parliament and ODIHR itself previously listed, as one of their key recommendations, a meaningful and comprehensive review of the voter roll and civil registries, carried out with the participation of institutions, political actors and civil society organizations. On July 31, ODIHR also recommended a full international observation mission for the Serbian elections.
“That recommendation is now clearly being sidestepped. We are therefore calling on you to state, clearly and publicly, your position on the failure to implement one of the key recommendations you yourselves issued to improve the electoral process in Serbia.”
Beograd Ostaje is asking ODIHR not to wait for another election to once again note irregularities after the votes are counted. According to Masina, the letter states: “Don’t wait for new elections to once again record electoral theft.” The initiative adds that Serbian citizens, in its words, “will not allow what happened in the previous elections to happen again.”
Context: the citizenship figures and the election date
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic presented a different picture of the scale of new citizenships on August 20, during the RTS evening news. He said parliamentary elections would be held on October 18 or 25, and stated that 4,168 people had been granted citizenship this year, compared with a peak of 29,000 in 2022. That statement was not made in response to the Beograd Ostaje letter, which came seven days later, but it remains the only official figure released so far on the scale of naturalization ahead of the election cycle.
The gap between the 130,000 figure cited by the initiative for newly registered voters who gained citizenship, and the 4,168 figure Vucic gave for the current year, remains unreconciled, since the two numbers cover different periods and different categories. No institution has yet published a combined figure that would allow a direct comparison.
As of publication, the Serbian government, the National Assembly and ODIHR have not publicly responded to the Beograd Ostaje letter. The elections for which the review is being sought have not yet been officially called.
