Bosnia and Herzegovina needs an urgent reform of the electoral legislation in order to strengthen integrity and restore citizens’ trust in the electoral process before holding local elections. That is why it is necessary to solve the issue of manipulation with the counting of votes and voter lists, trade in election committees, misuse of public resources and illegal financing of political parties, are the key messages of the conference “Improving Electoral Integrity” organized by Transparency International in BiH (TI BiH), and at to which the final report of the monitoring of the election process in 2022 was presented.
TIBiH data showed a huge increase in public spending during the election period, where over 313 million convertible marks were spent on one-time social benefits before the elections, which can be directly attributed to indirect vote buying.
The TI BiH report also showed that key parties in BiH concealed at least 1.7 million BAM in election campaign expenses. It was also stated that BiH is significantly behind the surrounding countries that have regulated the issue of misuse of public resources and increase in public spending during the election period.
This issue is still not regulated by the Electoral Law of BiH, which only partially sanctioned the abuse of public resources through changes made by the High Representative in July last year.
At the conference, members of the Central Election Commission (CEC) presented an overview of judicial practice, which showed that the sanctions imposed by this institution for misuse of public resources were largely overturned due to the inadequate legal definition and interpretation adopted by the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The CEC report also showed that, due to court practice, numerous sanctions for trafficking election committees were eventually overturned by court decisions, which is why this problem continues to represent one of the key shortcomings of the electoral process.
For this reason, it was concluded that it is necessary to reform the election administration in order to put an end to the trade in election committees, and the need to introduce electronic voter identification, scanners and other solutions that would prevent the theft of votes and other irregularities that characterized the election process was also pointed out.
It is also necessary to regulate the behavior of parties and candidates in the election campaign, in order to sanction threats to voters, as well as all other forms of pressure on citizens and employees in the public sector, TIBiH announced.
