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Investigators from Bosnia’s state investigation agency, SIPA, have filed nine charges of electoral fraud concerning so-called “fictitious” voting in the 2018 elections in the District of Brcko.
The charges come after SIPA conducted three related investigations into this offence, which it has submitted to the state prosecution.
The charges, which BIRN Bosnia has seen, report Dejan M, Jovan K, Miljan V, Biljana P, Nebojsa R, Aleksandar S, Djuko V, Slobodan L and Bojan K to the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia.
“Appointed by the Election Commission of the Brcko District, they conducted so-called ‘fictitious’ voting, meaning they signed on behalf of voters who were on the voter lists but did not use their active voting rights,” the crime report notes.
In this way, by voting for somebody else, the nine ultimately falsified the results of the October 2018 elections at polling stations for which they were responsible, the report said.
Aleksandra Pandurevic, a former deputy in the House of Representatives of Bosnia’s state parliament and a member of the board of the opposition Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska, said her party had reported the irregularities in the elections in Brcko.
Bosnia is divided into two autonomous entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, RS.
The Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, holds power in the RS.
The District of Brcko, however, is a small autonomous district whose territory is part of both entities.
“In Brcko, the SNSD was working on this and the SDS reported the election irregularities,” Pandurevic maintained.
The SNSD in Brcko has refused to confirm whether the named suspects were party members, and BIRN Bosnia has not independently confirmed the SDS claim.
According to the the investigation, one witness, named only as T. S, confirmed that his daughter voted on October 7 last year, despite living in the US for two years and not coming to Bosnia for that whole period.
The 2018 elections, the eighth election in Bosnia since the 1992-5 war ended, was marked by various allegations of fraud and manipulation of the identities of deceased people.
Many of these dead voters remain in the ID system. Other questions concern the imbalance between the number of valid ID cards and the number of registered voters in and outside the country.
While these and other allegations are made almost constantly in Bosnia, little has been done to ease concerns.
Data on the website of Bosnia’s state court show only one person has been convicted under a first-instance verdict of election fraud, in the 2014 general elections. That verdict came in 2015.
