Kladovo: 425 Requests to Vote Outside Polling Stations

The Kladovo Municipal Election Commission closed its list of voters for voting outside polling stations on Thursday, October 22, with 115 people on it. By Friday afternoon the list held 425 names, according to opposition commission member Srdjan Beric. Suspecting that citizens are being signed up without their knowledge or consent, Beric reported the case to police.

Beric made the claim in an interview with the portal Masina. According to him, only three calls to sign up came in on the municipal administration’s official landline on Friday morning, yet by the time of the interview the list had grown to more than 460 people. Masina’s headline refers to almost 500 requests. Commission chair Milos Sejnjanovic did not answer questions, so the other side of the story has not yet been heard.

What Beric says about how requests are filed

Beric does not dispute that citizens can request to vote outside a polling station. His objection is to how the requests are collected and entered. By his account, the commission works like this:

• some commission members, who are municipal employees, copy data into the logbook from paper lists of unclear origin
• when asked where the lists came from, they were told that “people brought them in” and that requests arrived on commission members’ private phones
• on one occasion an unknown man who did not introduce himself came to the commission with a list of several voters’ names, and the people on that list were entered into the official records
• on Friday, when he arrived for his shift, the logbook was with the commission chair in another room, not with the members on duty

Beric told police he suspects the sign-up mechanism is being abused, because there is no trace that the people listed actually consented, that they have the right to vote, or that there is any reason for them to vote outside a polling station. He says he has information that police drew up a report, but he does not know whether it was forwarded to the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office in Negotin.

What bothers the commission member is that nobody can verify who files the requests:

“As a member of the Municipal Election Commission, I am obliged to draw attention to the suspicion that the sign-up process is being abused, that lists are being drawn up somewhere unknown, probably, and brought to the local election commission, and that we are not able to check who is registering these people,” Beric said.

Asked about the scale, Beric put the figure in the context of the municipality in the same interview:

“We know we are a municipality with a lot of elderly people, a lot of returnees from abroad, pensioners who have come back to their home region. We do not dispute anyone’s right to exercise their right to vote or not to vote. Both are guaranteed by the Constitution. But what is a problem for us is the way some people are being registered.”

According to Beric, the government’s representatives on the commission argue that the law does not say how a voter notifies the commission, who may register a voter, or how many people one person may register.

What does the law say about voting outside a polling station?

The Law on the Election of Members of Parliament gives the right to vote outside a polling station to voters who cannot reach one because of serious illness, old age or disability. They notify the local election commission no earlier than 72 hours before election day, or the polling board on election day, by 11 a.m.

The law does not specify how to notify, and the Republic Election Commission has not prescribed a request form. Beric therefore drew up a form himself, with fields for name, address, number in the voter register, personal identification number, phone and the reason for voting outside the polling station, plus a field to be filled in if someone other than the voter is registering them. According to him, that last field was added so that links between the people who register voters could be spotted. The logbook the commission officially uses, he says, records only name, address, voter register number and phone, without the personal identification number, on the grounds that such numbers must not be taken from citizens.

Beric also explained what he considers problematic in practice:

“It is clear to us that a person who is immobile, for example, may not even be able to make a phone call. And the most logical thing is for one of their closer family members to register them, or possibly a neighbor or a relative, but that does not mean that person can register 10, 15 or 20 people, and that is what is happening continuously now,” Beric said.

Marijana Pajvancic, a retired professor at the Faculty of Law in Novi Sad, argues in a guest column for Pescanik that only a voter can file a request. In her reading, a helper may assist a voter only when the voter cannot fill in the ballot alone, and so has no right to file a request on the voter’s behalf.

What is known about earlier elections?

At the 2023 parliamentary elections, more than 100,000 voters, about 2.7 percent of those who voted, cast their ballots outside polling stations, and in some municipalities that share exceeded ten percent. The figures were reported by BIRN, citing an analysis by Professor Pajvancic. Of 168 municipalities, in 100 the share of citizens who voted outside a polling station was higher than the three percent election threshold.

Masina reports that polling board records from earlier elections show people listed for voting outside a polling station who denied filing the request themselves, as well as one deceased person.

The sources do not say that police or prosecutors have commented on Kladovo. Parliamentary elections have been called for Sunday, October 25.