When Anel Kajtezovic checked where he is registered for voting in the upcoming general election on the Central Election Commission (CIK) website, he was surprised to see he already voted - from Austria.
“It all started two days ago when I tried to check whether I’m registered as voting in the same place as every other year. I sent an SMS and found out that I am voting via mail, from outside of Bosnia,” Kajtezovic said.
He then checked the CIK website for further details.
“I found that someone registered me as living in Austria, in a suburb of Linz, with a person named Ozegovic Fadil. (I found out) that everything was registered, all the documentation was sent, that person or someone from that family voted in my place,” he said.
But Kajtezovic insists he was in Bosnia all along.
He reported the issue to CIK and was told that a person in the northeastern town of Velika Kladusa has registered him based on an old identification document that the institution accepted as valid until the year 2020.
But Kajtezovic said he got a new ID in 2013 because he changed his place of residence, and the Interior Ministry confirmed to him that the old ID is not valid anymore.
He believes that the CIK had not updated it's database. Bosnia's general election will take place on October 7.
Kajtezovic said he is worried about what could be happening to those who do not vote.
“People who don’t vote could never uncover these kinds of fraud. Had I not asked for information on which polling station I am voting at, I would never have found out that someone already voted for me,” he said.
Kajtezovic’s case is far from the only one. Numerous citizens of the eastern town of Srebrenica have contacted N1 over similar cases.
Abid Dudic said he is registered as living with a woman in Novi Zvornik, western Serbia, even though he never lived in the neighbouring country.
“I once lost a driver’s license, exactly at the crossing between Mali Zvornik and Veliki Zvornik (in Bosnia). I don’t know if that is something significant, but I never lived in Serbia, and I was never registered as living anywhere else,” he told N1.
The CIK would not comment on these cases for N1, but they did confirm that there was suspicion of abuse of personal information and that prosecutors will be informed about it.
“We daily get two or three complaints from voters who say that someone registered them as voting from outside of Bosnia via mail without their knowledge or consent,” CIK spokesperson Maksida Piric told N1.
Piric explained that the CIK gathers all such cases and will forward them to Bosnia’s Prosecutors’ Office on suspicion of abuse of personal data and document forgery.
“Someone else needs to conduct an investigation and determine if someone falsified documents and abused personal data and who did it. We do not have the legal competencies to do that. We have the legal obligation to register voters from abroad when someone submits us valid documentation,” she added.
Piric said the number of such cases will be known when the packages from abroad containing the ballots are sent via mail, which only the voter or someone from that person’s immediate family may take over.
But there is no way to reveal such a case if someone votes in place of a person who does not vote.
Issues regarding the registered places of residence for voters are not new, according to representative from the local election watchdog ‘Pod Lupom’, Vehid Sehic.
“I think that this will be a frequent occurrence. There were cases of prize contests where organisers sought photocopies of both sides of a person’s ID. There are hundreds of thousands of such cases,” Sehic said.
Some 42 thousand voters were registered as voting via mail in the last election. This time, that number has doubled, which means that there are more opportunities for electoral manipulation.
