The authorities are silent on warnings about tens of thousands of "double voters", neither are the parties

That Montenegro has a serious problem with so-called double voters was also shown by the results of the presidential elections, primarily in the light of the fact that the newly elected president of our country, Jakov Milatović, according to the analyses, received at least 21 thousand new voters, beyond those who supported the others in the first round candidates, except for Draginja Vuksanović-Stanković, whose votes, in the second round, went to Milatović.
It is reasonable to suspect that the majority of those "surplus" votes, which significantly exceeds the total number of those who supported Andrija Mandić, Aleksa Bečić, Goran Danilović in the first round, are "double voters" from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The cameras of the Ministry of the Interior, available to the public, stopped working at all border crossings around five in the morning, April 2, and started working around noon, after stormy reactions from citizens on social networks.
The Ministry of Interior announced that the "video surveillance that is publicly available was not functioning due to the load on the infrastructure", without clarifying what kind of load it was.
They said that, unlike the public one, the "internal video surveillance of the border crossings" was fully functional all the time, and that "the recorded material is adequately protected and available to the competent authorities in case of need".
Have the competent authorities, above all the prosecutor's office, requested to view the recordings - there is no information for now.
A member of the polling committee at a polling station in Nikšić told Pobjeda that on April 2, "a huge number of people who arrived from Bosnia and Herzegovina voted in that city, which was not the case in the first round."
On the day of the local elections in Montenegro, on October 22 last year, the media reported on large crowds at the border crossing with Serbia - Dobrakovo, where priests of the Church of Serbia greeted travelers, with folders in their hands, presumably to direct them where to go. they should vote.
Analyzes of the election day in Podgorica showed a sudden influx of voters from outside in the period from 6 to 7 p.m. on October 22, which is believed to be the result of the organized bringing in of "double voters".
The NGO CEMI, which has been monitoring and analyzing election processes in Montenegro for years, warned in February of the problem of "double voters".
By the way, this organization was the first to warn about this problem, after it discovered "double voters" in the voter list of Herceg Novi and Nikšić ahead of the local elections in 2021, at the level of 10 percent. However, the MUP then referred to the opinion of the Agency for the Protection of Personal Data and the identification of illegally registered voters was stopped.
CEMI's estimates are that there are twice as many registered voters who, apart from Montenegro, exercise their right to vote in Serbia, potentially even - between fifty and eighty thousand.
There is no willingness of the states of the region to provide data on registered voters in their states, in order to compare how many Montenegrin citizens exercise their right to vote simultaneously in Montenegro and the states of the region - said the executive director of this organization, Ana Nenezić, for Radio Free Europe.
She explained that "the countries of the region are called upon to protect the confidentiality of personal data, which is why they do not submit the necessary documentation to Montenegro, in order to solve the problem of double-registered voters".
The problem of "double voters" was also registered by the European Commission in the latest report for 2022.
There is no comprehensive audit to increase public confidence in the voter register, for example by conducting field tests. It is necessary for competent authorities to thoroughly investigate previous claims about double-registered voters in one or more countries of the region - the EC Report says.
In January, Pobjeda published an analysis in which we pointed out that the huge disparity between the number of voters and the number of inhabitants, which were almost equal, indicates that the voter list is neither accurate nor up-to-date. The European standard is for this ratio to be 70 percent, and in our country the number of voters in relation to the number of inhabitants is even 88 percent.
In as many as five municipalities in our country, as we wrote, there are more voters than residents?!
The Ministry of Internal Affairs has concrete evidence of the existence of at least 3,500 double-registered voters, but the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia has not responded positively to requests to verify these persons.
Until August 30, 2020, the current parliamentary majority, while they were the opposition, continuously had objections to the voter list and demanded control and updating.
In March 2021, the opposition Democratic Party of Socialists filed 954 criminal charges, against every single person for whom they had evidence that in double registered voters in Nikšić. They did not tell us what was the fate of those applications.
The application was also initiated by the NGO Montenegro International, which included officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as well as deputies in the Parliament of Montenegro who were registered in the voter list of another country. In addition to the criminal complaint, they also pointed to the fact that the entire family of Bogoljub Šijaković, a former minister in the Government of Serbia, was entered in the voter list in Nikšić.
As they told us, they never received an answer to the criminal complaint.
And Montenegro will have new elections in June - extraordinary parliamentary elections, again with a disorganized voter list.
TAKEN - POBJEDA