Monitors: Bogus Voters Remain on Macedonia's Electoral Roll

The election monitoring coalition We Decide! (Nie Odlucuvame!), which is running an SOS hotline for reporting electoral irregularities and offers legal help to voters, warned at a press conference on Tuesday that the authorities have failed to fully clean up the electoral roll.

We Decide! said it had received repeated reports from voters about bogus names being listed as residents at their addresses.

The initiative, launched by over 20 NGOs including the Macedonian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, the Foundation Open Society - Macedonia and the Macedonian Centre for European Training, said it had received some 30 reports of election irregularities, most of which were about non-existent voters, and all the problems it has encountered remain unaddressed.

"We are five days ahead of the early general elections. Our conclusion is that the electoral roll has not been cleared of non-existent voters, also known as phantom voters," Maja Velickova, a legal expert from the initiative, told Tuesday's press conference.

We Decide! said that the police failed to react quickly and check these reports, forcing those who reported problems to go through a complicated administrative procedure.

The State Electoral Commission, DIK, also did not react, it said.

We Decide! said it could bring a criminal complaint against the DIK for allowing fake voters to cast ballots.

The election monitors also said that over the previous 24 hours, they had received reports from voters who were initially registered in the electoral roll which is available online, but had disappeared after the roll was officially sealed last week.

The monitors' announcement dovetailed with a Monday report by NOVA TV, which cited an unnamed source...