44,141 Diaspora Voters Registered, Most in Bosnia
SSP data show 44,141 voters registered to vote abroad for Serbia's October 25 election in 61 countries, most from Bosnia and Germany. Officials say overseas polling stations are still undecided.
A total of 44,141 voters have registered to cast ballots from abroad in Serbia’s snap parliamentary election on October 25, spread across 61 countries, according to figures released by the Freedom and Justice Party (SSP).
The numbers were announced on September 28 by Marko Dimic, deputy member of the Voter List Review Commission on behalf of SSP, who stressed that the figure did not come from the Republic Election Commission (RIK) or the Foreign Ministry, but from the party’s own review of the voter list.
Dimic said releasing the data was his responsibility, since the official bodies had not published comparable numbers of their own so far.
“Since the Republic Election Commission and the Foreign Ministry led by Marko Djuric are concealing the data on the number of voters registered to vote abroad, I believe it is my duty, as deputy member of the Voter List Review Commission, to inform the public of the data we have obtained,” Dimic said in the SSP statement.
Neither RIK nor the Foreign Ministry has released an official count of voters registered abroad, so Dimic’s figures cannot currently be confirmed or disputed through an official source.
Most registered voters are in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with 12,608, followed by Germany with 7,189, Austria with 2,805, the United States with 2,412, Italy with 1,889, Switzerland with 1,657, Canada with 1,302 and Montenegro with 1,208.
A second group of about ten countries each has several hundred registrations: the United Kingdom with 1,076, Slovenia with 1,066, France with 1,029, Sweden with 877, Spain with 868, the Netherlands with 829, Norway with 814, North Macedonia with 744, Australia with 618 and Belgium with 543. In the remaining roughly forty countries, registrations fall below 500, and in a number of states, from Iceland to Tunisia, fewer than ten voters have signed up.
Opening a polling station abroad requires at least 100 registered voters, though Dimic noted that RIK can open one with fewer registrations through a special ruling. The deadline to register to vote from abroad is October 3.
That same morning, speaking on public broadcaster RTS, RIK president Vladimir Dimitrijevic said polling stations abroad had not yet been determined, nor had those in correctional facilities. He put the current number of polling stations inside Serbia at 8,210. Dimitrijevic neither confirmed nor denied the figure SSP had put forward.
The civic initiative Kreni-Promeni raised a separate problem with the registration process on the same day, saying citizens abroad were not receiving confirmation that their documents had been received, nor any update on the status of their applications. According to the group, most complaints have come from Abu Dhabi, followed by Ljubljana, Berlin, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Jakarta, Bern, Oslo, Banja Luka and Hamburg.
We reported earlier that RIK has no data from embassies on the number of registered voters, and that students abroad are seeking access to the registration list. Until the October 3 deadline passes, it remains an open question whether RIK and the Foreign Ministry will release their own official figure, and whether it will match the one put forward by SSP.
