Polls Open on Belgrade Time

Serbia votes for a new parliament on Sunday 25 October, and for the citizens who will vote abroad, polling day will run on the clock in Belgrade. In a session that ended at 2:10 on Monday morning, the Republic Electoral Commission, known as RIK, voted 20 to 7 to open every polling station outside the country from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Central European Time, the same hours as at home, Srpske Novine reported. The proposal came from the Foreign Ministry.

For voters in Chicago, which has a large Serbian community, that means polls open from 1 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Associated Press reported. Nemanja Djurovic, a voter in Brisbane, told Balkan Insight that polling in Australia would run from 5 p.m. on Sunday until 6 a.m. on Monday. A voter in China, speaking anonymously, said the embassy in Beijing would be open from 2 p.m. until 3 a.m., and that it is the only polling station approved for the whole country.

The same session approved 93 polling stations abroad, compared with 81 at the 2023 election. Election officials said at least 100,000 citizens had applied to vote abroad, nearly three times as many as in 2023, according to AP.

What the law says, according to each side

The members who backed the decision pointed to the statute. Zeljka Radeta cited Article 91, paragraph 4, of the Law on the Election of Members of Parliament, which, as Srpske Novine summarised her argument, provides that election day abroad lasts 13 hours and ends no later than 8 p.m. Serbian time. Tatjana Kitanovic said the decision protected the integrity of the vote: on earlier occasions, she said, results from individual stations abroad had spread on social media once voting there closed, and some had used them to “announce the final victory” while others were still voting.

The members who voted against called the decision unlawful and unprecedented. Ivan Sebek said such an arrangement had never been introduced since Serbia began organising voting abroad. “You are further restricting voters’ rights and effectively cutting the time available to exercise their right to vote in half,” he said, as Balkan Insight reported it. Vladimir Dragas called the decision “completely illegal”. Zlata Jusufovic noted that if the law required this, all of the commission’s earlier decisions on voting hours abroad would have been unlawful. David Krstic said the ministry had no authority over electoral law, and rejected its assessment that early publication of results from individual stations could endanger the electoral process.

On the arguments as reported, the dispute is narrower than the language suggests: whether a rule that the day abroad end by 8 p.m. in Serbia also requires it to begin at 7 a.m. in Serbia, wherever the polling station is.

Where the stations are

The list of stations is the second dispute. Sofija Mandic, a legal expert and member of the commission, said the changes ignored opposition requests for more stations in North America, Australia and Europe. “This could effectively close the door for more than 26,000 people,” she told the independent broadcaster N1, according to AP. She also said the Foreign Ministry was choosing where to put some stations “based on assumptions of how people are going to vote.”

The foreign minister, Marko Djuric, denied that. He wrote on X that the choices were guided “not only by the number of registered voters, but also by logistical, security, spatial, (and) staffing” criteria, AP reported.

Krstic said nearly 1,300 people had applied to vote in Vancouver, where no station was assigned, and that the nearest ones, in Toronto and Ottawa, are about 3,500 kilometres away. In Australia, stations were approved in Melbourne and Sydney only, and Djurovic said voters in Brisbane had been directed to Melbourne although Sydney is closer. Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has a large ethnic Serb population concentrated in the Republika Srpska entity, will have 28 stations, nearly 30 per cent of those abroad, AP reported. Vucic is popular among Bosnian Serbs, the agency noted.

The objection

The Student List, the electoral arm of the student protest movement and the main challenger to Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party, said it would file an objection to both decisions at RIK’s offices in Belgrade on Wednesday and called a rally there for 6 p.m., Srpske Novine reported. In its announcement, the list claimed that at least 12,000 voters will be forced to vote during the night, and that in 49 cities in 29 countries at least 100 people had registered, the legal minimum, without a station being opened. Srpske Novine said it had found no response from the ministry or the commission to those figures, and treated them as the claims of one side.

Diaspora organisations have also appealed to the European Union, the OSCE and the United States, EUalive reported.

The election was called by Vucic before he resigned as president on 27 September, more than seven months before the end of his second and final term, in a bid to return as prime minister, AP reported. His party has governed for 14 years. Analysts expect a close race and high turnout, the agency said, and some commentators have suggested that the student cause has strong support among Serbs abroad, according to Balkan Insight.

Sources

The commission’s vote, the time it ended, the statements of Radeta, Kitanovic, Sebek, Dragas, Jusufovic and Krstic on the hours, and the Student List’s figures are as Srpske Novine reported them; Sebek’s and Dragas’s quotations are in Balkan Insight’s translation, and Article 91 is cited as Radeta did, not from the text of the law. Chicago’s hours, the count of stations and of applications, Mandic, Djuric, Vancouver and Bosnia are from AP. The Australian and Chinese voters spoke to Balkan Insight. The diaspora appeal is from EUalive.