Although there have not been too many pre-election activities in Mostar, public funds are being spent on repairs that have been waiting for years, some candidates are collecting points on the coronavirus, children… and some are there just to sell places on polling station committees, while the big ones are already arranging distribution of functions.
Written by Mirna Stankovic – Lukovic
It is the last week of the campaign before the elections in Mostar, the first to be held in this city in 12 years. Activities are intensifying – according to the Bljesak.info portal, a pothole in Stjepana Radica Street, which has been waiting to be repaired since 2019, could finally be asphalted, and other infrastructure works have been launched, which were delayed for weeks. The “heavy cavalry” is coming from Sarajevo to provide support to its staff.
Before the end of the campaign, no one stops at anything. Transparency International has published a brief analysis of the pre-election activities of Dr. Mario Kordic, the holder of the HDZ BiH list for the City Council of Mostar, which clearly shows how some candidates are abusing public resources, children and the coronavirus pandemic for personal promotion. According to TI, in addition to examining patients in the hospital where he works in a promotional video, for the needs of the campaign, Dr. Kordic also visited the Mostar isolation ward, and distributed packages to children with Down syndrome.
In the interview she gave to our portal, Boska Cavar, the candidate of Nasa stranka, pointed out that information was circulating in Mostar that representatives of certain parties had already inspected the medical records of people who would not be able to come to the polls.
– It is known that all teachers were listed and that they were told that they know who will vote where and for whom. Another thing, since the two leading figures in the constituencies for the Center are doctors, we have heard that their parties have picked up documentation or cards from people who will not be able to come to the polls for a crown or some other reason, so someone will work on their behalf, that is, that mobile teams will register electoral votes for them, said Cavar for Interview.ba.
The Platform for Progress is also preparing for possible irregularities in the election process. According to Dr. Mirsad Hadzikadic, the party has developed a software application to prevent election theft in Mostar that will allow their members and observers to automatically enter the actual number of votes into the phone, which will then be summed up on a server on the Internet.
– So, we will have accurate results and we will be able to see the difference between the actual and reported results, says Hadzikadic for Interview.ba.
The electoral fraud expected in Mostar is the same as that which occurs in every election for any level in BiH and which, according to Hadzikadic, will continue until the courts start punishing the perpetrators of such acts and the parties to which these people belong, if it turns out that the parties were aware of such events and did nothing to prevent or stop them.
– The elections in Mostar will mirror the elections in the rest of the country, which means that they will include voting of the dead people, deliberately making invalid votes, buying votes, carrying ballot boxes home, replacing real summary results with falsified final results, applying the Bulgarian train method, making voting difficult for diaspora, late sending of ballots to the diaspora, exclusion of “undesirable members” of polling stations, placing their members on polling stations through other parties that sell their seats to other parties, pressure on employees of public institutions and companies to vote for certain parties, use of taxpayers’ funds for one-time financial benefits to a certain structure of society, sending mobile teams only to people who know how to vote, etc. There are probably many other methods of vote theft that are unknown to us at the moment, says Hadzikadic.
27 parties and coalitions and four independent candidates have registered for the elections in Mostar. The city is divided into seven constituencies, but the principle that 100,864 registered voters are distributed among the polls is questionable.
– The lists for Mostar were made seven years ago, and the city is now divided into six constituencies and the City Area, people were signed in as someone fancied. I have a concrete example where my friends, wife and husband, have been living in the same apartment since 2013 and he is voting in one constituency, she in another! This is a direct violation of these legal regulations and the Central Election Commission is responsible for that, said Boska Cavar from Nasa stranka for Interview.ba.
However, a brief analysis of the candidate lists in Mostar reveals one interesting detail – out of 27 parties and coalitions, as many as 16 are running with only one candidate. Among these parties is “Capljina u srcu” which had one candidate each on the lists in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Lukavac… There is also the Independent List Doboj – Sevlid Hurtic, BOSS, Liberal Party of BiH, Movement Bridge, Alliance of Young Forces, Independent Bosnia and Herzegovina List, Liberal Democratic Party, HSS Stjepan Radic, HKDU…
Vehid Sehic, President of the Strategic Committee of the Coalition “Under the Magnifying Glass”, told Interview.ba that this phenomenon is nothing new and that it has become a general phenomenon that political entities appear in elections with only one candidate.
– Many political entities apply to cede their seats on polling station committees to large political parties. This violates the BiH Election Law, where we will actually have two or three members of polling boards from one political entity, and the law is clear that there can be only one member from one entity, says Sehic.
Berislav Juric, the editor of the Bljesak.info portal, also believes that behind this number of parties with one candidate each, there is a trade in seats in polling station committees, and that this can be seen in the lists of polling stations.
– Parties that have one candidate each are quite inconspicuous, ie completely invisible. There are some candidates running independently who claim to be “mayoral candidates”, which speaks volumes about how much they have strayed into the campaign, Juric told Interview.ba.
Dr. Mirsad Hadzikadic says that there are certain problems when it comes to the formation of polling boards in Mostar.
– There are attempts to remove our members from the polling stations or to transfer them to the polling stations of constituencies where we are not on the lists, so that we cannot prevent election thefts. We are trying to prevent that. Also, we still do not have the infrastructure that has been developed at the level of the infrastructure of some much older parties, so it is not easy for us to find all the people we need. But we are doing everything we can to minimise vote theft regardless of whether that theft is directed against our candidates or the candidates of other parties. We just want a fair and honest election process, says the President of the Platform for Progress.
According to Vehid Sehic, the practice of only one candidate running in the elections began in 2004 when 11 independent candidates appeared for the elections in Siroki Brijeg Municipality. Sehic was a member of the Central Election Commission at the time.
– At that time, a delegation from the HDZ came to me, they complained that those were frauds, however, it was all in accordance with the law. After the elections, I took those 11 independent candidates to see how many votes they got. Of those 11, only one received one vote. These others did not even vote for themselves, but they did it because one political party paid them 500 KM in the fee to register, they participate equally in the distribution of seats in the polling stations, but in those places they were actually members of the party that paid the fee, says Sehic.
It was the Radom za boljitak party that achieved a significant result in the 2008 elections in Mostar – seven councilors, as many as the HDZ BiH. The president of this party, Jerko Ivankovic Lijanovic, is now serving a seven-year prison sentence, and the party is not on the electoral lists. The only thing left is the practice of trading seats in polling stations.
– It started then, later it became a business, so it was known that seats are sold from 500 to 2000 marks, depending on how many polling stations they got. Everything is contaminated here, everything is business here, classic voter fraud, and that is my biggest problem, says Sehic and adds that the Coalition “Under the Magnifying Glass” is writing proposals for changes to the Election Law to prevent it, “because they do not have municipal boards have nothing, but the law allows them to run. ”
– Our proposal will be that political entities must have their own municipal board at least one year before the elections, and then monitor whether they work at all, says Sehic.
Berislav Juric, editor of Bljesak.info, thinks that the whole campaign for this local election, although 12 years have passed since the last one, is quite strange, so even the “big ones” have not had some big campaigns.
While some parties are satisfied with selling seats on polling stations and serving “political mentors”, large parties deal with the distribution of so-called election booty – positions in institutions, companies and committees.
Portal Hercegovina.info published an audio recording, which was allegedly made during an unofficial meeting between the SDA and HDZ in Mostar. In the recording we hear Ljubo Beslic, the mayor of Mostar and HDZ BiH staff, saying: “I called Salem (Maric, president of the SDA Mostar City Board). Salem, whoever you say, is my choice, for the first people of any SDA institution. ”
