There is a huge increase in the number of people registered as voting from abroad in the local election this year compared to privous elections and the Central Election Commission (CEC) already received about 3,500 complaints or reports of abuse of personal data after it published the list of those voters on October 1.

There are 101,771 people registered as voting from abroad in the 2020 local election, which is to take place on November 15.

In the previous election in 2018, there were 77,814 names on that list.

Among those who found that their personal data was misused is Sandra Pekez. She lives, works and votes in Banja Luka. However, her data appeared on the Voters’ List for voting outside Bosnia and Herzegovina, stating that she is in Serbia.

Pekez said that the last time she was in Serbia was in 2013, when she was staying in a hospital. She found her name on the list after a member of her family, journalist Dejan Sajinovic, pointed it out.

He told N1 that “it is high time to restore confidence in the election process.” “I think that one of the best solutions would be for all parties and political entities to sign some kind of declaration and publicly commit that in all subsequent cycles they will do everything to ensure a clean election process and that the people who win the elections are truly those who have gained the trust of the citizens,” he said.

This is far from the only such case, as the media found and reported hundreds of similar cases of irregular voter registration, mostly from Serbia.

The leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) told the media on Tuesday that his daughter was the victim of irregularities in voter registration abroad as well.

“This is her proper application for the elections with the address and country where she resides – Germany, and this here is a duly certified document which states – ‘your application meets the conditions for voting outside Bosnia and Herzegovina in Switzerland’,” Niksic said, as he presented the two documents to reporters on Tuesday.

“By the way, when she checked she saw that she was also on the voter registration list in the town of Konjic,” he added.

SDP’s Vojin Mijatovic said that the huge increase in the number of voters abroad on the list specifically refers to those registered as voting from Serbia and Croatia.

“We have some information which says that intelligence agencies from those two countries are involved in the process. There is no doubt that here we are talking about several criminal acts. Someone stole IDs and passports from the CIPS (Citizens Information Protection System) or some other system in Bosnia and Herzegovina and handed the information to Serbia or Croatia,” he said.

The CEC said it “will be receiving evidence of attempted fraud all the time until the results of the Local Elections 2020 are confirmed and use the mechanisms provided by Bosnia’s Election Law to prevent all election irregularities.”