Votes that were cast in three constituencies that are mostly populated by ethnic Croats in the city of Mostar have disappeared overnight, the Croat National Assembly in Bosnia (HNS BiH), an organisation made up of Bosnian Croat political parties, said on Monday, urging international observers to react to “scandalous electoral engineering.”
The southern city had its first local election since 2008 on Sunday and the votes are still being counted. However, the HNS, as well as the main Croat party in the country, the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ BiH), alleged that there were attempts at election fraud in the city.
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“The Central Election Commission of BiH, with the procedures that followed the closing of polling stations, especially the delays in the entire election process after 7 pm, is creating a rift in the election process in the city of Mostar. Namely, in the overall projection of preliminary votes published by the BiH CEC, fraud attempts can be seen, ie the disappearance of votes from the three city constituencies inhabited by the majority Croat population – the South, West and Southwest,” according to the HNS BiH.
“We demand the urgent involvement of international factors and friends to bring this process to light in the electoral, legal and any other sense in order to save the electoral process,” the HNS BiH said, adding that there is a reasonable suspicion that the votes won by Bosnian Croat parties were simply “attributed to someone else, especially after the fact that the parties of the so-called pro-Bosnian bloc did not win the number of votes they planned” and that they “compensated the low turnout of their voters” by stealing Croat votes in collusion with members of the CEC BiH.
