Opposition Party: Election Commission Passes Three Problematic Decisions Ahead of Election

The Party of Freedom and Justice

The Freedom and Justice Party said on on Oct. 12 that the Republic Election Commission's working groups had passed three problematic decisions ahead of announced elections and that these decisions would be placed on the agenda of the Commission's next session.

The party said that one of the decisions which was passed by the Commission's working group for finance by majority vote of its members from the ruling coalition was to procure RSD95 million worth of electoral material via direct negotiations - without a public call, even though the Law on Public Procurements recognizes other, faster procedures that are conducted through public calls which it said immediately raised questions about possible abuses.

Two other problematic decisions were adopted by the Republic Election Commission's working group for normative affairs, that is it rejected a proposal by representatives of the Freedom and Justice Party for the standardization via a set of instructions the form for the reports that local polling station committees create. Given last year's exceptionally bad practice when the objections of members of committees including every violation of the law noted at a polling station were written down on a separate piece of paper which was submitted along with these official reports we know that these papers frequently "gets lost" and who knows how many inaccurate results were legalized due to the "disappearance" of papers containing objections to the legality of voting, the party said in a statement.

"The Freedom and Justice Party's proposal enabling the merger of several procedures stemming from objections into a single procedure and the adoption of one decision was also rejected. This prevents the local polling station committees that will conduct elections from merging all objections into one, which they will now be able to do on a massive scale based on their own interpretations. Evidently the Republic Election Commission now wants all local polling station commissions to employ the collective rejection of objections," the party said.