Elections in Serbia

Is Vote Fraud Possible?

Less that a week before election in Yugoslavia, the only certain thing is that Slobodan Milosevic will do everything to win, and the only uncertainty is whether the opposition will catch him red-handed as a petty thief or an outright robber.

AIM Podgorica, September 19, 2000

(By AIM Belgrade correspondent)

On Monday, September 11, the Federal Electoral Commission announced that the FRY electorate consists of slightly over 7.8 million voters. According to estimates of independent statistical and demographic experts, the appearance of some 200,000 new voters cannot be backed by publicly accessible documents nor by any reliable birth rate data. Apparently, the regime has adjusted the size of the electorate on the basis of demographic trends among the Kosovo Albanians, despite the fact that not a single census has been taken in this segment of the population since 1971. Such adjustment, its possible accuracy notwithstanding, can but serve a single purpose: to make easier the manipulation of the electoral will of the people, or, simply speaking, to facilitate fraud in the upcoming vote.

Over the past decade, Milosevic has shown little dislike towards schemes aimed at securing in advance magnificent election victories for him and his "partners, starting from the December 1989 referendum which served to consolidate his position as Serbian president and at which, according to official data, the turnout was 104 percent. By skillfully manipulating the weak and disunited opposition vying with him in nationalism and populism, Milosevic used the following years to perfect his election-winning methods.

POISED TO CHEAT: Vote manipulation to change the will of the voters, that is, vote fraud was always difficult to prove if the opposition did not have access to voter rolls and monitors at polling stations. Indications that vote rigging was taking place were always the strongest in Kosovo, where the Milosevic regime had its main support in the Kosovo Albanians' refusal to participate in the vote. This was the source of a paradoxical situation in which incumbent Serbian President Milan Milutinovic beat his co-runner Vojislav Seselj, from the Serbian Radical Party, precisely in Kosovo and thanks to ballots "cast" by Kosovo Albanians.

This victory-generating system began to erode four years ago, when the regime scored yet another convincing victory in federal elections and quite unexpectedly – even from the standpoint of the opposition - lost the second round of local elections in Serbia. The defeat in the forty largest cities and towns in Serbia was due to three crucial factors. Yet another triumphal victory, blown out of proportion in state-run news media, made government supporters less watchful of the runoffs and many failed to go to the polls again. On the other hand, a part of the opposition mustered enough strength to run together in the second round, and to ensure vote monitoring at slightly less than two-thirds of polling stations. Finally, certain of yet another landslide victory, the state-run media featured on the sport reporting during all of election day and the following night. When the outcome became obvious, regime activists lost their nerve: in a desperate attempt to "salvage victory" they forged thousands of election records. The magnitude of this insolent cheating in the winter of 1996/97 made hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Milosevic responded with police cordons until, under pressure from the European Union and the unabating strength of the protests, he was finally forced partially to concede defeat.

DESTROYING OPTIMISM: Today, four years later, local power means little to the opposition, because Milosevic has meanwhile transferred many of its prerogatives to the Serbian government and the Serbian legislature, both completely loyal to him, and consisting of Seselj's Radicals and deputies of the Socialist Party and Yugoslav Left, firmly controlled by the Milosevic-Markovic couple. Fully true to his interpretation of legality, Milosevic excluded Montenegro from the game as well, changing the Yugoslav Constitution in an extremely doubtful procedure and introducing a direct vote in electing the Yugoslav president, with the sole purpose of keeping him in power.

At the end of last year it appeared that Milosevic had politically survived the NATO bombing of the country and spontaneous protests by the population faced with the horrifying consequences of his way of defending Kosovo, the territory and sovereignty of the state, and even the United Nations as the highest international instrument of peace. Media campaigns lauding the reconstruction of the country, however, have failed to produce the desired effect. A government cannot constantly renew that what has been destroyed without even the most devoted follower asking himself or herself by whom and to what purpose the destruction occurred in the first place. The mandatory deduction of "daily solidarity wage" to fund the reconstruction, praised as being a result of the wise policy of the Leftists in power, also failed to delight ordinary people, forced to survive on some DM 80 per month. To the contrary.

Finally, this time around the regime failed to prevent the painstaking and prolonged unification of the Serbian opposition, forced by popular pressure and public opinion polls, which constantly showed a united opposition as having a much greater advantage than any of the parties and leaders individually. It turned out that the "principled" refusal of the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) to join the unification did not diminish the popular support enjoyed by a conglomerate of 18 parties, regional and trade union organizations which named itself the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) and decided to nominate Vojislav Kostunica as Milosevic's challenger for the post of Yugoslav president. All public opinion polls taken in the past four months have shown that the popularity of the DOS, and particularly of its presidential candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, has been soaring.

PREPARING THE GROUND: It is now obvious that Milosevic decided to call the elections having in view the results of opinion polls taken last spring, which showed that he enjoyed much greater support than any of the opposition leaders. This fact, according to a number of independent and opposition analysts, coupled with his belief that negotiations on the opposition's unification would end in failure, or that the opposition would end up being led by easily corruptible Serbian Renewal Movement, promised yet another routine election victory.

Preparing the ground for yet another Milosevic victory, however, this time turned out to be a much more comprehensive and complex enterprise that any other in the past. Milosevic used legal and police measures to foil an attempt by non-government and civic society organizations to motivate the electorate, particularly women and first-time voters, to vote, or, applying "the Croatian recipe," to train people as "domestic monitors," which practically forced them underground. On the other hand, invitations to monitor elections were sent to tested friends from the Russian state Duma, India and China.

The Federal Electoral Commission, in violation of even domestic election law, has decided to use a single copy of the voter register for federal, presidential and local election alike. Consequently, voters who wish to cast their ballots only in presidential election are risking to have their names abused in all other elections, because they will be encircled the minute they appeared at the polling station. The voter register itself is inaccessible to opposition control, as is the process of ballot printing. Experience from the 1996 elections has shown that extra ballots were discovered at many polling stations, whereas the register included the names of long deceased people, those who left the country years ago, and there were even instances of the same people being listed at several polling stations.

SOURCES OF FRAUD: The size of the pool that will serve as a source for vote manipulation is hard to gauge. On the other hand, by attaching all of Kosovo to the Vranje and Prokuplje voting districts, areas in which it enjoys substantial support, the regime has again included in the game at least one million "Albanian" votes, that is, that portion of the electorate whose election boycott has allowed for the comfortable victory of Milosevic and his candidates in all elections so far.

The Montenegrin authorities decision not to recognize federal elections, much like they do not recognize Milosevic's "federal parliament" and the recent changes to the Yugoslav constitution, but not to prevent people from voting either, provided Milosevic with yet another abundant source of votes. Thus, the votes of Kosovo Albanians and Montenegrins, have already secured Milosevic 38 to 43 of the total of 138 seats in both houses of the Yugoslav parliament before the polling stations even opened.

The third such pool consists of the votes of Kosovo refugees, who, at least nominally, will be allowed to vote anywhere in Serbia. Nominally indeed, because the regime is not really encouraging them to vote, suspecting that not too many of them would support it after what they had to put up with as refugees. That the regime is bent on tampering with their votes as well has become rather clear as of recently, when state officials began estimating their number at 350,000, despite the fact that only 187,000 of them have been registered, and not all of them are eligible voters. If all these assessments are correct, then the regime will appear at the September 24 vote backed not only by its traditional supporters, but by a "pool" of over one million additional votes.

PETTY THEFT OR OUTRIGHT ROBBERY: All of the above figures do not include ballots that certain voters will place in the ballot boxes with the names of candidates already circled on them in advance. The existence of such ballots was confirmed in the 1996 elections. Employees of large state-run companies are given such pre-marked ballots and, under the threat of losing their jobs, are told to bring back the blank ballot given to them at the polling station, to serve as proof that they voted with the one they received through the proper channels. Rumors on the circulation of such ballots are widespread, but are hard to prove, as cases of blackmail usually are.

On the other hand, the opposition expects that rampant dissatisfaction, and not only by opposition-leaning people, will reduce possibilities for vote manipulation. The opposition hopes that even without the Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID) - whose 12,000 trained monitors are barred from supervising the vote but will not be banned from standing in front of the polling stations at least to determine whether they were opened, as CeSID's Zoran Lucic says - it will prevent massive vote fraud because it will have representatives in voting boards at almost 10,000 polling stations in the FRY. DOS' Dragor Hiber claims that the group will have monitors at some 95 percent of polling stations, and Serbian Renewal Movement's Miladin Kovacevic says that all polling stations will be covered.

Despite mutual animosities within the opposition, all sides agree that only mass voter turnout can prevent a large-scale cheating in the elections that could change the outcome. Experts are unanimous in saying that the line after which it is difficult successfully to rig the vote coincides with the figure of 4.2 million voters. Thus, if 4.5 million people vote on September 24, Kovacevic, who is an expert in electoral mathematics, says the regime would have to steal 12-15 percent of the vote, that is, some 500,000 to 700,000 ballots. Zoran Lucic, a professor at the Mathematics College in Belgrade and a member of the Federal Electoral Commission in the 1996 elections, believes that a voter turnout of 4.5 million would require massive theft and subsequent forging of this figure as well. If five million people cast their ballots, says Lucic, it will be impossible for them to steal the vote.

DENOUEMENT: High turnout can prevent vote theft or at least make it difficult, but cannot stop outright robbery, when the criminal has no intention of even trying to conceal his deed, says Dragor Hiber, who, as head of the opposition legal team of experts in 1996, is to be mostly credited with exposing the vote fraud of four years ago. "Whether the robbery will be successful, how long the robber will be allowed to retain his booty, what means will he be forced to use to retain it, and what means the robbed will use to return what belongs to them, is another matter," says Hiber.

Taken some ten days ahead of the elections, a public opinion poll by the Strategic Marketing agency has confirmed a forecast by one of the most prominent public opinion experts, Dr. Vladimir Goati, who put the turnout at some 80 percent. Also, increases in the popularity of Vojislav Kostunica have been registered. The regime is aware that massive fraud might chip away at the bleak support it enjoys from Russia, China and India. This is why in addition to publishing new data on the number of eligible voters and hurling ever more base accusations at the opposition, blaming it for all the misfortunes that befell the population in the past decade, the regime has stepped up repression against all civic society organizations, all forms of independent resistance and against all attempts to motivate voters to decide their own future.

Aleksandar Ciric

(AIM)