Bosnia's Elections Debut Scanners and Fingerprint Checks
The Central Election Commission has rolled out digital document checks, fingerprint scans and ballot scanners, and Republika Srpska already accuses the new system of favoring the opposition.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s general election is scheduled for October 4, 2026, and it will be the first in which votes are not counted by hand by polling station committees but by machines. For Belgrade, this is not a distant technical story: the same day decides both state and entity institutions, meaning Serbia’s counterparts in the region for the next term, and the party currently running Republika Srpska is already, before the campaign has officially opened, disputing how those votes will be counted.
The Central Election Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina released a video walking through the new procedure step by step, from arrival at the polling station to handing in the ballot. The first change awaits voters at the door. Identification is done with an ID card, driver’s license or Bosnian passport, and the data is read electronically. A biometric check follows, in which the voter places the right index finger on the device’s sensor.
The second change is inside the voting booth. An X no longer counts. The circle in front of a party’s name or a candidate’s name must be completely filled in, since the device reads the filled surface rather than the shape of a hand mark.
What does the parliamentary ballot look like?
On ballots for parliaments and assemblies, party names run down the left side, with columns of candidate numbers on the right. Voters may fill in the circle for only one political subject and cast a vote for up to three candidates from that same list. On ballots listing individual candidates, only the circle next to a single candidate’s name is filled in.
Candidate names will not be printed on the parliamentary ballot itself. They appear on candidate lists that the polling committee hands out together with a protective folder and a special marker, and the list is returned to the committee after voting.
A completed ballot is not folded. It is placed flat inside the protective folder, then fed into the scanner one sheet at a time, face down. The device recognizes the filled circles and counts the votes electronically, so manual counting stops being the main source of results at the polling station.
Spiric: suspicion that the scanner picks the winner
Nikola Spiric, deputy speaker of the House of Peoples in the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, says the election commission is creating outright confusion ahead of the campaign. He argues that the complicated voting method, along with changes he calls legally questionable, raises suspicion that the scanner favors whoever never wins elections, and he points to a program his party, in his words, has pursued for twenty years in the interest of Republika Srpska.
New technology, old opposition
He made the remark in a statement to the Srna news agency. Spiric expects the new equipment to further complicate matters once election night is over.
A similar tone is coming from Milorad Dodik, leader of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, who claims the system will collapse on election day itself. Dodik says that in other countries elections revolve around voters and political parties, while in Bosnia and Herzegovina the scanner has become the most important factor, and that a ballot listing numbers instead of names will look like a lottery ticket.
Ballot papers are not designed to make things easier for the voter, but to be acceptable to the scanner
He also raised a series of technical questions for the election commission: how long voting takes for a single voter, how long data processing takes when a large number of polling stations send queries at the same time, how stable the internet connection is, and what capacity the data transfer runs at. He concluded that Republika Srpska should activate its own election commission in case the process stalls.
From fingerprints to accusations of rigging
Debate over the new equipment in Bosnia and Herzegovina has so far run mostly along data protection lines. The election commission previously stated that the fingerprint taken at the polling station is deleted after the election, something we reported when that explanation came out of Sarajevo. What is changing now is the nature of the dispute: for the first time, Republika Srpska is openly claiming that the technology is not neutral and was chosen to favor one side.
That makes the scanner a campaign issue rather than an administrative one. Candidate lists, which are still to be submitted to the election commission, and the start of the campaign itself are yet to come, so the first complaints about the voting procedure are surfacing before anyone has even gone before voters. Both sides’ claims will face a firm test on October 4, when it becomes clear how long voting for a single voter actually takes and how fast the devices send results.
