The President of the Central Election Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CIK BiH), Irena Hadžiabdić, said that at the moment the conditions for the introduction of new technologies in the 2026 General Elections are not met, because specific conclusions on the feasibility study have not been adopted and funds have not been secured.
She said this at the conference “New Electoral Technologies: Experiences from Local and Application in General Elections” organized today in Sarajevo by Democracy International in Bosnia and Herzegovina (DI BiH) with the support of the CIK BiH and the Coalition for Free and Fair Elections Under the Spotlight.
According to their plan, Hadžiabdić added, the funds should have been secured by the end of April.
She said that amendments to the Election Law should be urgently initiated and the CIK and partner agencies should be assisted in creating a reliable, convincing, credible and secure system and in acquiring the equipment and applications needed for the general elections.
Hadžiabdić emphasized that the CEC reports they submitted are periodically adopted before the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“The BiH PA adopted all of our reports, except for the Second Periodic Report, which the House of Peoples will discuss on Thursday. In this way, politics has given us support,” stated Hadžiabdić.
Hadžiabdić emphasized that new technologies were tested for the first time for the 2024 Local Elections, which gave them insight into election administrations, voters and technical operators.
“What is behind us is a very successful test and all indicators speak for that,” she said, adding that they had been waiting for that test and pilot project for almost eight years.
She also reminded that the first activities for the introduction of technologies were launched back in 2016 at the initiative of the non-governmental sector and the CEC due to the increasing demands of voters who had very low trust in the electoral process in the way it had functioned so far.
“We came to a situation where, due to the members of the polling stations who were appointed exclusively at the proposal of political entities, we could not have control over the electoral process. We were aware of manipulative actions in connection with the voting process itself, and especially with manipulative actions such as changing the results during the counting,” she said.
All of this, Hadžiabdić added, greatly undermined trust in the process and they sought new modalities to overcome this problem.
She cited the slow counting as another major problem, because it is a complex electoral system.
“In the last elections, when we had new technologies and when we replaced the presidents of the polling stations in a way that we appointed them as persons who must not be connected to politics, we counted the ballots much less,” she said.
Hadžiabdić pointed out that new technologies have shown that results can be obtained in 40 minutes.
“30 percent of the results arrived via scanner in five minutes, and 60 percent in 10 or 15 minutes. We had problems in implementing and presenting the results, but what we did, we did in just a month and a half, which is a great success,” she said.
She also added that they could not have done anything without the donors who supported them.
“Without them, this would not have been realistic for the Central Election Commission, which lacked all possible knowledge about the equipment itself, its functioning, and information and communication technologies,” she concluded.
The Director of the Electoral Integrity Support Project in BiH, Tihana B. Blanc, assessed that the CEC had made a huge step forward because it had made the elections in BiH more transparent and accountable, testing several pilot projects in seven municipalities and the Brčko District.
“The pilots improved the electoral process in BiH and strengthened voters’ trust in the electoral process by automatically generating and transmitting election results within minutes of the polling stations closing,” she explained.
She claims that the differences between the results counted manually and automatically were negligible.
Blanc said that without the improvements, the election administration in BiH could be vulnerable to fraud and suspicion.
“Expanding the use of such technology from seven municipalities and the Brčko District to 143 municipalities is a major undertaking and requires significant effort and work. This includes procurement, technology, logistics, programming, new software, training for polling stations, technical experts such as operators to use these new technologies, work on adapting the legal framework for the introduction of such technologies, and training for election observers and civil society who need the necessary tools to observe such new technologies and elections,” she explained.
Blanc said that these political projects were supported by the US government and that she can confidently assess how the US government’s policy is changing.
“In the US today, bipartisan support for the integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the continued successful implementation of the Dayton Agreement has been expressed. However, what the new US administration has not expressed is its intention to provide long-term support, that is, to continue this type of assistance that would enable support for the CEC pilot, new technologies and other support that is needed,” she said.
But Blanc is sure that there are other bilateral and multilateral partners who are ready to provide support in this segment.
The participants had the opportunity to directly test the technologies used during the pilot and discuss the possibilities for improving the electoral process in BiH, Fena writes.
