As Chairperson of the Republic Electoral Commission I am obliged to react to the scandalous and tendentious claims of the header of the Electoral List of Civic Group "We Have To" Nebojsa Zelenovic, published in an article on 31 March 2022 on the Nova.rs internet portal.
Namely, Mr Zelenovic claims the "new plan for election theft" embodied in the Instruction for the handover of electoral material before and after the voting, in which, as stated, the Republic Electoral Commission provided that the electoral material be carried in unsealed bags from the polling station to the municipal electoral commission after the voting and thus making it possible for the electoral material on the way from the polling station to the municipal electoral commission to disappear or be replaced!
Regarding the above, I would like to inform, first of all, the public, as well as Mr Zelenovic, that sealing the bags with the electoral material, both when handing over said material to the polling stations before the voting, and when taking it from the polling stations after the voting, was introduced as practice in the Republic of Serbia for the first time during the previous presidential elections in 2017, at the suggestion of the very ones who are now being tried so openly and unscrupulously to impute the creation of a new plan for alleged election theft.
The fact is that the bags of electoral material were never sealed at the polling station after the vote, an idea that Mr Zelenovic could very easily have implemented at a time when he was in a position to implement his ideas.
I would also like to inform Mr Zelenovic, and at the same time reassure the public who can easily be disturbed by such distortions and blurring of the truth, that the "disputed" Instruction was unanimously adopted by 32 members of the Republic Electoral Commission expanded composition, including the representative of Civic Group "We Have To" who also voted for the adoption of the proposed Instruction, which Mr Zelenovic can see by watching the recording of the 11th Session of the Republic Electoral Commission of 23 February available on the Republic Electoral Commission web presentation.
