In connection with the information published on the N1 news portal that the invitation to vote at the snap parliamentary elections and Belgrade City Assembly elections on 17 December 2023 had arrived at the address of the late journalist, Gordana Suša, the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government informs the public of the following:
The data on voters contained in the Single Electoral Roll are directly conditioned by data from other official records (records on residence and domicile or citizenship of citizens, Register of Deaths and Register of Marriages), and solely depend on the correctness, accuracy and up-to-dateness of these data.
In order to further improve the Single Electoral Roll, we linked it to the Civil Records. In order to accurately inform the citizens, we would like to explain the concrete steps that are taken in the event that a person dies. First, the healthcare institution, i.e. the physician, must establish the fact of death, after which the hospitals send the Death Certificate electronically to the registrar. The registrar then enters the fact of death into the Register of Deaths, and simultaneously delivers that information electronically to the electoral registration officer who keeps the Single Electoral Roll. The electoral registration officer who keeps the Single Electoral Roll must confirm that information with one “click”, i.e. to allow a change in the system.
In this way, the State proactively undertakes actions which the citizens previously had to initiate themselves. Therefore, in such and similar cases, the citizens no longer have to go to the counters or contact the administrative authorities in any other way, because the authorities shall do everything themselves.
However, regardless of the fact that the updating of the Single Electoral Roll is nowadays a digitized process in terms of the electronic exchange of data between civil servants, a human is ultimately involved in the entire process from beginning to end, and human errors are possible, albeit quite rarely.
The Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government had found that, in this particular case, the electoral registration officer who keeps the Single Electoral Roll had failed to verify the information he received from the Register of Deaths at the end of the process, and for that reason this change was not automatically entered into the Single Electoral Roll. We want to publicly point out that such situations do not happen often, and are resolved as soon as possible.
The Single Electoral Roll is updated daily based on the established mechanism of communication with the official records of other authorities, and has never been more organized.
The Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, Aleksandar Martinović, PhD, has said that the attempt to present such isolated cases as frequent is actually another attempt to upset the citizens of the Republic of Serbia before the upcoming elections and create an atmosphere that “electoral fraud” is being orchestrated by the authorities.
Also, the Minister referred to the Agreement on Improving the Conditions for Conducting Elections, which was signed on 29 October 2021, by the then Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, Ivica Dačić, and representatives of political parties that were involved in the Working Group for Inter-Party Dialogue, by which an agreement was reached to improve the election conditions, which has been done. Martinović has emphasized that the opposition has very strong mechanisms to control how the election day proceeds at each polling station, and that the constant spreading of misinformation about the “non-up-to-dateness” of the Single Electoral Roll is irresponsible behaviour and an attempt to deceive the public.
He added that the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government shall carry out all its work, including those related to the work of the relevant electoral actions, exclusively in accordance with the current regulations, as it had done so until now.