David Isailovic Registers Three Student List Look-Alikes
Serbia's Business Registers Agency recorded three associations with names nearly identical to the Student List on September 3, all founded by David Isailovic, weeks before the October 25 election.
David Isailovic, born in 2000 and residing in Belgrade, is listed with Serbia’s Business Registers Agency (APR) as the founder of three citizens’ associations whose names almost exactly mirror the name of the Student List, Students Win. The three groups are called the Student List of Serbia, Students Win; Students Win; and the Student List of Belgrade, Students Win. All three were registered on the same day, September 3, with the same statute and the same address: Bulevar Arsenija Carnojevica 126a in New Belgrade.
The public only learned of the filings on September 11, when the Students in Blockade movement posted a notice about the registrations on its Instagram account, @studenti_u_blokadi. The movement said only one list bears its name, the Student List, Students Win, and warned that the similar names could confuse voters ahead of the snap parliamentary election called for October 25. The notice went up before the deadline for submitting election lists to the Republic Election Commission (REC), in the same weeks when political actors and movements are filing their candidacies for that same date.
According to its own statute, the association Students Win was founded to preserve and strengthen social cohesion and improve the efficiency of state institutions. On the same day, with an identical statute, Isailovic registered two more associations whose names simply add Student List of Serbia and Student List of Belgrade in front of the shared words Students Win. That brings the names close enough to the election list’s name that they are difficult to tell apart at a glance, while the matching statute and address make a coincidental resemblance even less plausible. Three separate associations formed independently of one another would not, as a rule, end up with statutes and addresses identical down to the last letter.
Students in Blockade linked the registration of the three associations to a recent change to the election law that now allows a single person’s signature to support more than one election list. Before the amendment, a voter’s signature was tied exclusively to one list, so a duplicate signature automatically disqualified the second submission. With that restriction gone, a name close to the original list opens the door for part of that list’s signatures to be redirected to a rival filing, one a voter might not notice unless the name is read carefully. The movement cited that exact change to the law as the reason for its suspicion that the three associations were registered on purpose, not by accident. In its public statement, the movement said the following.
Because of the recent changes to the law that allow one person’s signature to support multiple lists, we have well founded suspicions that the regime will misuse state resources to submit fake lists bearing the name of the student list. Only the Student List, Students Win is ours.
The movement added that if the suspicions turn out to be true, its list will have an appropriate response.
The claim that state resources could be used to submit a similarly named list remains, based on available sources, a suspicion that no one has independently confirmed, not an established fact. Neither Isailovic nor government representatives have publicly commented on the three APR filings, and no explanation has been offered for why one person registered three nearly identically named associations at the same address in a single day. It also remains open whether any of the three will actually try to register an election list before the deadline the Republic Election Commission has set ahead of October 25, when voters go to the polls for the snap parliamentary election.
