The Central Electoral Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CEC of BiH) passed the Decision on determining and publishing the number of voters registered in the files from the Central Voter’s List for voting outside BiH for the 2022 General Election, which established that the files from the Central Voter’s List for voting outside BiH found a total of 69,872 voters.
President of the CEC of BiH, Suad Arnautovic, said in an interview for agency Fena that this is not yet the final number, because the deadline for appeals that can be filed by voters whose applications were rejected, and there are 10,749 of them, is running out. The appeals deadline expired last night atmidnight.
Arnautovic notes that the appeal can be resolved in such a way that the CEC of BiH accepts it and makes a different decision, or that the appeal with a statement is submitted to the Appellate Department of the Court of BiH for resolution.
He called on the voters who submitted an application to vote outside BiH, to visit the website of the CEC of BiH and check whether their application was rejected and to possibly use the possibility of filing an appeal.
Arnautovic says that the number of registered voters to vote outside BiH this year is lower than in the local elections of 2020, when there were around 153,000 applications. However, he states that there were a lot of duplicate applications, and there were also those who did not meet the requirements for registration. In the end, that number was reduced to around 103,000, but a much smaller number exercised the right to vote.
“If we look at some quantification, we can say that now relatively fewer voters are registered. However, I would rather talk about one quality, one qualitative relationship and the improvement that we introduced thanks to the help of the OSCE Mission in BiH and through the portal ”e- Elections” (”e-Izbori”), which has been in full function for voter applications for voting outside BiH since the day the elections were announced. It has proven to be very efficient, functional and easy to use,” Arnautovic said.
He pointed out that in terms of quality, they have made a lot of progress and this number, Arnautovic stated, can be considered a really realistic number at the moment.
“We must not forget that in the past elections and other election cycles, according to realistic estimates, there were those who abused the registration process itself. Some cases were prosecuted. Unfortunately, a number of such cases will probably never be discovered. But the fact is that qualitatively, we got a lot from this application,” Arnautovic said.
Unfortunately, we could not introduce the biggest changes in this sense, because it is the Parliamentary Assembly (PA) of BiH that should adopt the strategy and action plan and decide in which direction the digitization of the electoral process in BiH should go, which would also accompany changes to the electoral legislation,” explains Arnautovic.
He says that the CEC of BiH has taken measures and steps, with the help of friends from the international community, to introduce some innovations and digitization of the electoral process in parts of the electoral process for which it is not necessary to change the Election Law of BiH. That is why, he adds, they are satisfied and grateful, above all, to the OSCE Mission in BiH.
“We are satisfied with these solutions, because we have several applications that significantly facilitate the technical part of the implementation, implementation of the election process,” the President of the CEC of BiH pointed out, and added that it will not stop there.
He announced that tomorrow he will promote the e-observer (e-posmatraci) application, which will enable observers of political parties, the non-governmental sector, and international observers, who will be in record numbers this year, to register in a simple way and observe all parts of the electoral process in BiH.
