The new local governments in Bosnia were already elected and operational when Edin Kalender found his voting ballot in an envelope that finally reached him in Fiji.

Kalender and his wife followed the registration process laid out on the website of Bosnia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) for the November 15 election and with the help of the Bosnian embassy in Australia requested a ballot to be sent to him.

“Very soon we received a reply, saying the registration was successful and that the ballots will be mailed to our address,” Kalender told N1.

However, the ballots arrived mid-January, two months after the election.

“It is possible that the envelopes were opened here at the post office and checked for suspicious material or money,” Kalender said.

His family will not complain as they could not find instruction on how to do that and do not believe it would do any good, he said.

“Weeks before the election we asked the CEC what was going on with our ballots and they claimed they sent them and gave us a tracking number. But on that system, we could not get any information other than that the mail was put into a bag for export on October 16, 2020.,” he said.

“We could not see the route and the CEC has not given us any feedback from then on. The Embassy in Australia was regularly checking what was going on but they could only wait, just like us,” he said.

The Kalender family was expecting the ballots to arrive until election day “because we did not want them to be misused,” Kalender said.