Buying votes, pressures on voters are something citizens in Serbia have been dealing with for years, not only before the elections, but also during the entire period between two election cycles. However, in the December elections, something happened that had not been recorded until now - the ruling party organized fictitious voter migrations! The entire operation was precisely managed, a large number of people had to participate in it, and it had to cost several hundred thousand euros, says Rasa Nedeljkov, program director of Crta, in an interview for "Vreme".
"WEATHER" How the organized migration of voters was carried out and who all participated in it?
RAŠA NEDELJKOV: The only real and final answer to that question can be given to us by the judiciary if it were independent. And that would be the only authoritative finding on the basis of which we as a society will know what really happened. And this is something that we, as a civil society organization, are looking for - a quick reaction from the prosecution and all relevant authorities, including various inspections, both from the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government, and from the Internal Control of the Ministry of the Interior. They must determine to what extent who, when and in what way abused their powers in order to enable the systematic migration of voters from the interior of Serbia to Belgrade, but also to other municipalities in Serbia where elections were held, from those municipalities where elections were not held. maintained. We also include voters who were brought to the region from surrounding countries.
If we were to shift it now to the level of reasonable doubt as to who was involved in it, what would you say?
We reasonably suspect that the manager and employees of the Department for Registers and Local Self-Government of the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government participated, as well as the heads of organizational units in local self-governments in charge of the voter list. Also, the Administration for Administrative Affairs in the Directorate of Police, as well as individual employees in regional police administrations and police stations who work on registration and deregistration of residence and place of residence. Based on the testimonies and knowledge we have gathered, we suspect that in many cases the procedures for reporting residence have been violated. They were issued without accompanying documentation, and even without the presence of the person whose residence was changed. All this in order to move the voters in the local elections from location A to location B. That location B was most often in Belgrade, so that, above all, in the local elections in Belgrade, the electorate would be changed, i.e. supplemented by those voters who will vote for the ruling party.
We have numerous cases where there are several tens of voters at one address. How are these fictitious residences made??
We think that these operations were very precise, very organized and subtly done in such a way as to transfer a sufficient number of voters to different polling stations, without it being difficult to detect. Without an independent audit and analysis of the voter list, the public in Serbia will never fully know how many people were brought to which polling station. What we managed to do on the basis of publicly available data from the website of the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government - and I'm talking about the names and surnames of voters by polling station - is to determine that several tens of thousands of voters were brought to vote in Belgrade in the last year alone. elections. This is the minimum that we could determine based on the rather rough data we had. Just imagine what would be determined if an expert commission were to control the voter list. What we see in the data through various analyzes is that people were brought and distributed to different polling stations in sufficient numbers so that they are not absolutely noticeable, and at the same time that this number is sufficient to influence the election results, so that the parties in power have sufficient the number of votes for the number of mandates sufficient to form a majority.
GIK announced before the election that there were 0 in the voter list for Belgrade,7 percent more registered voters compared to the previous elections, which is about 1.000 more. How then is it possible that those few tens of thousands are still in the voter list?
That figure, which the government representatives present to the public, shows how many more voters there are in total. At no point did they say how many new voters there were, and how many voters were deleted from the voter list. What we reasonably suspect, based on the insider testimony and statistical data we have, is that within that set of electorates there was such a change where active voters who will vote in the Belgrade elections were brought in, and those people they knew about or were deleted assumed that they would not vote. Then in total you have a number that does not seem strange to the eye. What we don't see and what no institution has investigated at the moment is the question of what happened inside the voter list.
Can you elaborate on how this mechanism works?
If we take, for example, that we have 1.000 voters in Belgrade. And 500 new voters who were brought from places in Serbia where there were no elections or from Republika Srpska, in total it would mean that we have a total of 1.500 voters and then it would be obvious that something is wrong. And what happens if you delete 501 voters from the voter list that you know will not vote, and enter those 500 new ones? Then you would have a total of 999 voters. It could be said that the number of voters has even decreased. Or if you deleted 480, the total would be 1.020 voters. And then it is said that there are only 20 voters more than before. In addition to all that, there are also completely legitimate reasons for the increase in the number of voters in Belgrade, because we have those who have turned 18 years old, some have completely legally and legitimately moved to live in Belgrade, for work or to study. Some returned from abroad, some moved from Kosovo. But when we calculate all this in total, we are talking about some 50.000 people who actually moved in the previous year, and our data shows that we have more than 80.000 new voters. With a very conservative analysis, we can talk about several tens of thousands of new voters who we believe were illegitimately brought to Belgrade. The information we have indicates that many people were paid for it. So, we are also talking about corruption. And not only about the fact that those who came to Belgrade to vote received money, but those who received them at their addresses to be registered also received money. They sold their residence for money. We are talking here about an operation that had to cost hundreds of thousands of euros.
What is the number of those who participated in all this??
What is important for us as an organization that deals with the defense of institutions is that we unmasked the institutional collapse with our findings. We have shown that for all this to be possible, there had to be a sufficiently large number of people in the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government and in the MUP who turned their heads away from compliance with the law and internal procedures and implemented the party's request, which is that some people register in Belgrade in order to vote for the party that provided them with some benefit, and perhaps intimidated and blackmailed them.
When you say that those who do not vote or are assumed not to vote are deleted from the electoral roll, how is it even possible for someone to be sure of that? Isn't that too risky a move?
During the election day, a large number of people contacted us who went to their polling stations for which they previously, in the period of two or three weeks before the election, checked where they were voting and whether they were on the voter list. Some even received an invitation to vote, and then you could not vote at your polling station. They could not find them in the electoral roll. In addition to all that, we have a very clear circumstance that there are about a million to a million and a half more people in the voter list than actually live in Serbia. How many more people are there, how many people who must be on the voter list, our citizens, who live abroad is the answer that should be given to us by the revision of the voter list. Since we know that there are certainly more people in the voter list than the real situation, these are potentially voters, some of whom could have been temporarily deleted, while others could have been registered.
Apart from the manipulation of voter lists, what was done in the period before the election, and what influenced the final result of the election?
Access to the media and the way the media reported on the campaigns was dramatically on the government's side. Then abuses of public functions and institutions where citizens are misled as to who is actually running for elections. Is the state of Serbia or some parties on the ballot? We also had a misconception about what choices we have. Our public opinion survey from November showed that 60 percent of people thought that Aleksandar Vučić was a candidate in these elections, and a quarter said that we have presidential elections. We also had an economic dimension of manipulation in which the state distributed more than 400 million euros to three million people. Also, we had a lot of pressure and blackmail. One example is that if you had a job in the civil service then you had to secure a certain number of safe votes. A special dimension of unscrupulousness was seen through blackmail and intimidation of the most vulnerable citizens in our society, namely the sick and beneficiaries of social assistance.
And what happened after 17. December?
After the election day, according to the information we have, work is being done to remove traces of manipulations and to reset the situation to the previous one. But this is something that we, as a civil society organization, cannot know much more about without insider testimonies. This is something that the competent authorities should first of all investigate, initiate proceedings to tell the citizens what happened to the voter list. Because holding elections, under these election conditions, without punishing anyone for the crimes committed, is just maintaining the status quo.
In the spring, elections are coming up in a large number of cities and municipalities. Can we have electoral engineering happen again and "moving" voters and whether it is possible to prevent it?
With the existing way of working of the institutions, it cannot be prevented. Only if the institutions wake up and start protecting the public interest, then this is possible. If there is a political interest in conducting electoral engineering in some municipalities, we can expect this kind of "intervention" in municipalities where parties from the government have a bad rating. We no longer have any confidence in the electoral roll. We do not know whether the same people can fictitiously vote at several polling stations in different parts of Serbia in one election. We have a lot of reasons to suspect that the voter list has been manipulated and compromised to such an extent that we cannot say who has the right to vote in which municipalities, and which does not.
Where is the solution?
First, there must be public interest. Citizens have to say whether they are okay with this or not. Because if this is how the elections are going to be held, then they don't have to be held. Public pressure is needed to start with an analysis of the voter list so that we know what we have de facto at our disposal. The voter list must be published, the data from it must be public and the public must know what is hidden there. What is behind that, for example, that in Belgrade we have addresses with an unrealistically large number of voters. Citizens have to fight for that information. If the citizens say "I don't care", then we have nothing more to ask for in relation to the elections. There is no international community and no institution that will solve this for us. Institutions also need help. Those remaining individuals, the honorable officers, must be allowed to do their jobs. Here, the parties have captured the state so much that the institutions cannot do their job.
What does it mean in practice to publish the voter register??
This means publishing much more data than has been the case so far, but taking care to protect personal data. But bearing in mind that certain political actors have some or all of the voter's list at their disposal, we are asking for equality to be created in this sense. To begin with, the number of voters per address should be published, I repeat, fully respecting the protection of personal data.
