RIK: October 25 Ballot Will Be Purple
RIK has decided the ballot for Serbia's October 25 snap election will be purple, with a white control sheet, commission chairman Vladimir Dimitrijevic announced.
Serbia’s Republic Election Commission (RIK) has decided that the ballot for the October 25 snap parliamentary election will be purple, while the control ballot, used to check that a ballot box is in order before voting begins, will be white. The decision was unanimous, made at RIK’s second session on September 11, held just hours after the commission’s first session that same day.
RIK chairman Vladimir Dimitrijevic said the commission chose among three colors offered for printing by the Official Gazette (Sluzbeni glasnik), the institution legally required to print election materials within the statutory deadline.
“The ballot will be purple, and the control sheet used to check that the ballot box is in order will be white,” Dimitrijevic said.
Besides purple, the options on offer included apricot and kiwi. Commission members settled on purple as the main color and kept white for the control copy, which is used at polling stations to confirm that a box has not been damaged or opened without authorization before voting starts.
At the same session, RIK also adopted a Timetable for Election Actions, a document that sets out the deadlines for preparing the parliamentary election. Dimitrijevic said the timetable was aligned with several pieces of legislation.
“They were set in line with the decision calling the election,” Dimitrijevic said, adding that the timetable also draws on the Law on the Election of Members of Parliament and the Unified Voters’ Register.
The commission also adopted, on the same day, a decision on the forms for submitting electoral lists of candidates for members of parliament, passing it with 11 votes in favor, three against and three abstentions. These include forms for the electoral list itself, candidate consent, a voter statement supporting the list, and a list of voters backing it with their signatures. RIK likewise adopted registration forms for domestic and foreign observers, which are available on its website to any interested organization.
The snap parliamentary election was called on September 9, with voting set for October 25, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. RIK held its first session, at which signature collection for electoral lists also began, on the same September 11 as its second, as our outlet previously reported. At that pace, two sessions in a single day, the commission settled most of the technical questions that the rest of the election preparations depend on within the first days of the cycle.
