BIH Needs an Urgent Reform of the Electoral Legislation: Prevent Manipulations with the Counting of Votes, Trafficking in Election Committees, Misuse of Public Resources

Bosnia and Herzegovina needs an urgent reform of the electoral legislation in order to strengthen integrity and restore citizens’ trust in the electoral process before holding local elections. That is why it is necessary to solve the issue of manipulation with the counting of votes and voter lists, trade in election committees, misuse of public resources and illegal financing of political parties. These are the key messages of the “Improving Electoral Integrity” conference organized by Transparency International in BiH (TI BiH), where the final report of the monitoring of the 2022 election process was presented.

TI BiH data showed a huge increase in public spending during the election period, where over 313 million marks were spent on one-time social benefits before the elections, which can be directly attributed to indirect vote buying. TI BiH report also showed that key parties in BiH covered up at least 1.7 million BAM in election campaign expenses. It was also noted that BiH is significantly behind the neighboring countries that have regulated the issue of misuse of public resources and increase in public spending during the election period. This issue is still not regulated by the Electoral Law of BiH, which only partially sanctioned the abuse of public resources with the changes made by the High Representative in July last year.

At the conference, members of the Central Electoral Commission presented an overview of judicial practice which showed that the sanctions imposed by this institution for the misuse of public resources were largely overturned due to the inadequate legal definition and interpretation adopted by the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The report of the CEC also showed that due to court practice, numerous sanctions for election committees were eventually canceled by court decisions, which is why this problem continues to represent one of the key shortcomings of the electoral process.

It was concluded that it is necessary to reform the electoral administration in order to put an end to the trade in election committees, and pointed out was the need to introduce electronic voter identification, scanners and other solutions preventing the theft of votes and other irregularities that characterized the election process. It is also necessary to regulate the behavior of parties and candidates in the election campaign, in order to sanction threats to voters and all other forms of pressure on officials and employees in the public sector.

Press rls_06.07.2023_