According to the last population census from 2013, there were 3,531,159 inhabitants living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the last ten years, according to estimates, 600 thousand people emigrated from our country. However, according to the voter lists, there will be 3,406,088 voters in the upcoming local elections. That is about 37,000 more than in the General Election two years ago. BHRT investigated why the increase in the number of voters, even though the population is decreasing.
The voter lists are updated by the Central Election Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina based on the data submitted by the competent institutions on the number of deceased persons and citizens who renounced the citizenship of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The former CEC member believes that it is not so alarming that there are deceased persons on the central voter list. Irregularities in the work of electoral committees proposed by political parties are disputed, he says.
“A far bigger problem is which of the unscrupulous members of the electoral commission misused that fact, so they voted for them and voted and forged the signature of such a person or some voter in collusion with a member of the electoral commission,” says former member of the CEC of BiH Vehid Šehić.
Political analyst Tanja Topić reminds that in the previous elections, tens of thousands of dead people were on the voter lists, which, she points out, opens up space for electoral fraud. He notes that in some ballot boxes even 60 percent of irregularities in connection with election materials were found.
“There is a huge area of our citizens abroad who do not vote, but their votes and ballots are regularly found in the ballot boxes. It is obvious that someone has done the work for them. It is definitely a fact that such a situation suits the parties in power,” Topić points out.
For demographer Aleksandar Čavić, it is not a problem that there are more voters than residents living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He says that there is no great deviation in the number of voters between election cycles. Mostly adult citizens are added to the lists.
“Even though we have a higher number of deaths, our voter list is not reduced so drastically, it is reduced only based on negative natural growth. If we say that from the census of 2013 until today, based on natural movement, we have remained without 100,000 inhabitants, but you must know that a number people didn’t take out the documents, so in the meantime they took out the documents and entered them in the central voter list,” says Čavić.
Research by the Union for Sustainable Return and Integration shows that not only members are leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina in recent years
households, but complete families. Emigration is expressed in the Posavina, Una-Sana, Herzegovina-Neretva cantons and the Livan area. Most residents leave from Orašje, Odžak and Livno.
“By the end of 2023, according to our data from the field, about 600,000 people have left. These statistics will not be accepted by those who know that these people did not deregister from the cities when they left, so they are on record as living in BiH, even though they they left a long time ago,” emphasizes Mirhunisa Zukić, president of the Union for Sustainable Return and Integration of BiH.
In the last 10 years, more than 35,000 citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina renounced their citizenship, and our country was left without 45,000 elementary school students. The authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina do not have a plan to keep young people. If this demographic trend continues, estimates by the United Nations Population Fund say that Bosnia and Herzegovina will be without one million and 500 thousand people by 2070, BHRT writes.
