Kosovo Election Body Criticised Over Annulled Polls

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By Lawrence Marzouk

A report by the EU’s Election Expert Mission to Kosovo says Kosovo’s Central Election Commission, CEC, was unable to justify to the mission on which basis it had annulled election results without holding a rerun.

While fresh votes were held in most polling stations where electoral fraud had been detected, the CEC cancelled some results without ordering a second round.

According to the EU report, despite numerous requests for clarification, the CEC was unable to indicate which law permitted it to act in this way.

Kosovo
Kosovo

“As of 18 January, 2011, four polling station results were already annulled without a subsequent repeat vote,” the report reads.

“It would appear that the only provision of the LGE [Law on General Election] that could be relevant to the annulment of polling station results without subsequent repeat vote is LGE Article 120.1.b,” the report said, “yet it grants such discretion in exceptional circumstances not to the CEC but to the ECAP [Election Complaints and Appeals Panel].”

The CEC has confirmed that it believes it has the right to decide on annulments with no further explanations required.

“They [the polling stations] were ruled out from the election process. The CEC has the right to do that,” Fehmi Ajvazi, the CEC spokesperson, told Balkan Insight.

In Kosovo’s last local elections, held November 2009, some results from polling stations were also annulled without a new vote taking place.

Balkan Insight

The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

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