Serbia's National Minority Councils Vote; RIK Results Due Monday Evening

Members of 23 national minorities in Serbia voted on Sunday, 8 November, for the national councils that represent them in education, culture, media and the official use of their languages and scripts. According to the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK), 481,789 people were registered on the special minority voter rolls, and polling stations, 949 of them, were open from 07:00 to 20:00. A total of 52 electoral lists took part.

Who voted and how

Members of 21 councils were elected directly: voters choose one list from their own community and seats are shared in proportion to votes. The Goran and Russian councils are chosen by electoral assemblies. The largest rolls, as published before the vote, belong to the Bosniak (114,777 voters), Hungarian (108,974) and Roma (60,979) communities, followed by the Albanian (37,759) and Slovak (26,044) ones. Six minorities had only one list on the ballot.

In the Albanian community, the Kosovo government and Albanian political representatives in Serbia urged people to turn out. Part of the Roma community called for a boycott because only one Roma list was running, and representatives of one Greek list complained that rival Greek lists had been submitted in places with no Greek community, according to Beta.

When the results come

Dušan Dinčić, a permanent member of RIK, told FoNet that preliminary results should be presented at a commission session on Monday, 9 November, at 20:00, and that no turnout figures would be published on election day. Counting is slower than in parliamentary elections because many polling stations serve several communities at once: one station in Kragujevac holds extracts from the rolls of 17 minorities, and a separate record must be drawn up for each, even when only one voter is registered. By law, RIK must publish the results within 96 hours of the close of polls. A local coordinator in Novi Pazar told Tanjug that turnout there was 14.5% by 14:00.

Incidents reported

Vreme reported that police in Novi Sad detained the lead candidate of one of the five Ashkali lists on suspicion of vote buying after he was seen transporting voters. The Bosniak list Čuvari Sandžaka said a member of a polling board was attacked at polling station 48 in Novi Pazar. Neither claim had been confirmed by RIK by Monday morning, and the detained candidate has not commented publicly; he is presumed innocent.