Voting in Serbia (BetaPhoto/Emil Vas)
Aleksandar Jerkovic, a former member of the Serbian parliament, will be at the helm of a newly established election monitoring organization -- the Committee for Oversight and Observation (OKO), the Oct. 1 issue of the Politika daily reported.
Jerkovic will be the program director of the organization, which a press release quoted by Politika describes as "the first independent Serbian organization for monitoring elections and preserving democratic principles."
"The distinctiveness of this organization is its financing -- OKO will fund its activities solely through SMS donations from Serbian citizens in the amount of RSD30, which ensures full independence from foreign donors and interest groups," it was stated.
Jerkovic said the organization would be answerable only to its funders, that is, "solely to its people." "Western NGOs and international organizations (e.g. the ODIHR) often interpret elections through the political lens of their donors. OKO is conceived as a mechanism to gather authentic data from the field and to set them against possible manipulation and one-sided reports," Jerkovic said.
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