Elections in Montenegro
Montenegro holds a parliamentary election next month, but even before the vote count begins, the numbers don’t add up.
When Montenegro holds a parliamentary election next month, more than 50,000 ‘phantom voters’ will be eligible to vote; in some municipalities, the number of registered voters exceeds the actual population; more than half of names on the electoral roll are listed without a valid address.
These are the main findings of an investigation by the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network – LUPA and Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) fuelling concern over the risk of fraud in a vote coming against a backdrop of deep polarisation in the tiny former Yugoslav republic.
“It’s very important that parties and NGOs that monitor elections scrutinise the register so that the election results will be uncontested by all,” said Boris Raonic, head of the Civil Alliance, which promotes human rights and the rule of law in Montenegro.
“The authorities must remove any doubts when it comes to the existence of phantom voters,” he told LUPA/BIRN.
Data does not add up
On June 22 this year, with an election due on August 30, Montenegro’s interior ministry announced that the electoral roll contains the names of 541,232 eligible voters.
Something does not add up, however.
At the start of this year, according to the state Statistical Office, MONSTAT, the population of Montenegro stood at 621,873. That included 36,769 children up to the age of four, some 15,000 5-6 year-olds and a total of 67,166 7-15 year-olds enrolled in school for the 2019/2020 academic year.
Together with some 14,000 16-18 year-olds, according to MONSTAT, that makes just under 133,000 minors not eligible to vote.
That means there are 52,294 more registered voters than actual adults in Montenegro.
To confuse matters further, Interior Minister Mevludin Nuhodzic said in July that Montenegro has 678,178 resident citizens excluding foreigners.
And that’s not all. An analysis of the available data shows that in some of Montenegro’s 24 municipalities, the number of voters is greater than the local population. In some areas, the electoral register data does not tally with the reported number of pre-school children, those in school and the adult population, reinforcing concerns about the existence of so-called phantom voters.
The Montenegrin constitution grants voting rights to all citizens who have turned 18 and who have been resident in Montenegro for at least two years before polling day. The residence requirement is unusual in Europe; the opposition says it is designed to disqualify the significant number of Montenegrin citizens living in neighbouring Serbia, who, the opposition theory goes, are less likely to vote for the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS.
The DPS has been in power, uninterrupted, since the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia three decades ago. The party emerged from the League of Communists, which itself ruled from the end of World War Two.
The opposition has already cried foul over the data discrepancies; the interior ministry, however, has denied any wrongdoing and dismissed talk of ‘phantom voters’. It did not respond to LUPA/BIRN’s request for a response to this story.
Phantom Voters
Diaspora voters
The phantom voters uncovered by LUPA/BIRN are concentrated heavily in the municipalities of Petnjica, Plav, Gusinje and Ulcinj, where there are more registered voters than actual residents. (marked by red on the map).
The areas in yellow (see the map) are where there are considerably more registered voters than specifically adult residents. Coastal areas generally feature larger numbers of foreigners, hence the difference between the number of voters and the number of citizens is even bigger.
The municipalities of Petnjica, Plav, Gusinje and Ulcinj are known for large diaspora communities living in Western Europe, particularly Luxembourg, and the United States.
Opposition parties and civil society groups have accused the authorities of keeping these diaspora communities on the electoral roll, seeing them as reliable DPS voters. The current Law on Residence and Domicile Registers has dropped a previous provision by which those living abroad were automatically erased from the list of eligible voters.
Critics said it was no surprise that Montenegro’s national airline announced it would resume flights to Luxembourg in the second half of July.
They accuse the DPS of selectively applying the residency rule, keeping DPS voters abroad on the electoral roll and erasing those of the opposition.
However, the latest information shows us that the flight from Luxembourg was canceled due to the pandemic.
In 2013, in the coastal town of Herceg Novi, audio surfaced that appeared to feature DPS MP Daliborka Pejovic discussing erasing hundreds of voters from the local electoral roll since, she appeared to say, “the huge majority of them vote against us.” It would help “engineer a favourable election result,” the voice on the audio said.
Pejovic said there was nothing illegal in what she said and authorities never investigated the case.
Fewer people, more voters
Further analysis of Montenegro’s census results from 1991, 2003 and 2011 (as shown in the table) and data from the Statistical Office throws up more strange trends.
While the population of Montenegro has increased by fewer than 7,000 [1.11 per cent] since 1991, the number of eligible voters has risen by more than 138,000 [34.33 per cent] over the same period.
At the same time the number of Montenegrin citizens living in the country fell by 19,429 [3.30 per cent] as of 2018. The birth rate has dropped significantly, while the mortality rate is up.
Interestingly, the number of voters jumped sharply between 1991 and 1992 and again between 2004 and 2006. That coincided with referendums – the first on whether to remain in a union with Serbia and the second on whether to leave that union – both tainted by allegations of vote-rigging.
Data from the Statistical Office
“The estimates of some political entities and analyses of official statistics point to tens of thousands of phantom voters,” said Ines Mrdovic, legal adviser at the NGO Action for Social Justice.
“That’s enough to justify concerns about widespread manipulation which may likely take place in the late August ballot. Both local and international observers frequently raise the issue and demand the phantoms be removed from the electoral roll as one of preconditions for fair and free elections,” Mrdovic told LUPA/BIRN.
“The government has never tried to review the register as it doesn’t want to shoot itself in the foot.”
Further fuelling that concern is the staggeringly high number of eligible voters listed on the electoral roll without an address.
Momcilo Koprivica, an MP of the opposition Democratic Montenegro party, sounded the alarm in October 2019, pointing out that a staggering 278,820 voters were registered under so-called ‘BB’ addresses, meaning no street name or apartment number. Koprivica complained that such an oversight was ripe for abuse. The total electorate at the time numbered 532,599.
The government acknowledged the figures but dismissed his concern, saying BB addresses could not affect the result.
Data from the list of voters
Sources: Ministry of Interior, Statistical Office of Montenegro, Ministry of Education, UNICEF, Democrats of Montenegro.
Authors: Stanko Radulovic and Jovo Martinovic