The decision to boycott the repeated local election in Srebrenica is final, the mayoral candidate of the ‘My Address: Srebrenica’ Initiative told N1 on Tuesday, adding that the Bosniak coalition will call on its supporters to not vote on Sunday.
Bosnia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) decided to annul the November 15 election results for 26 out of 28 polling stations in Srebrenica due to numerous irregularities regarding the voting process and determined that people without valid BiH documents were allowed to vote.
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The institution set the date for the repeated election for February 21.
However, the My Address: Srebrenica (Moja adresa: Srebrenica) Initiative said the election authority did not do enough and should have also annulled the mail-in ballots for the Srebrenica local election.
This is why the coalition decided to boycott the upcoming election.
“We will call on our voters not to go to the polls. That is our message – that we are not accepting what the Central Election Commission did, that it deprived us of 800 mail-in ballots at the very start,” mayoral candidate Alija Tabakovic said.
The candidates of the coalition will still be running in the election and if they do get elected, they will not accept the mandates, he said, explaining that the town will get a mono-ethnic assembly and a Serb mayor.
“It is our battle to show that we can no longer tolerate injustice, that we cannot deal with the discriminatory system of the RS, Serbia, and in the end with bad decisions of the CEC,” Tabakovic said.
He said that, in the November 2020 election, the CEC rejected 800 of the 1,600 votes by Bosniaks abroad because they came in too late. However, the problem was that the voting materials did not reach Bosnian citizens abroad in time, he explained.
This is why the mail-in voting should be repeated as well, he said.
“The votes did not arrive timely due to the fault and mistake of a part of the CEC, because they were late in sending the material. Their obligation to end it was 45 days before the election. The first tour was five days late, the second 20, the third 35 days. They should have sent it all on October 1,” he said.
Tabakovic stressed that those 800 votes could have decided the election.
“We have lost confidence in the CEC,” he said, arguing that there is evidence that there were attempts to cancel the mail-in vote overall and that “preventing 800 people from voting is a crime.”
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