April the 18th, 2024 – The Croatian parliamentary elections are set to be repeated in two locations. The powers that be have explained why.
As Index vijesti writes, the President of the Supreme Court, Radovan Dobronić, held a press conference during which he announced the latest results of the Croatian parliamentary elections and commented on some irregularities.
“We’ve carried out a massive undertaking in a much shorter time than expected. In total, we have 6544 polling committees across Croatia, each with 10 people. This means that 70 to 75,000 people participated in the implementation of the recent Croatian parliamentary elections. I’m surprised that everyone is doing everything they’re doing with great enthusiasm, most of them with experience, and that’s why the election process was largely carried out in a satisfactory, very good way,” said Radovan Dobronić. Then he added:
“Regarding these elections, the percentage of turnout was 62.31 percent of the total number of registered voters, which is 3,557,875, from which it follows that 2,216,742 voters voted. Comparisons are being made with the situation in 2020, when the turnout was much lower, so it can be concluded that it’s been very good. That said, the higher turnout should definitely not be taken as the only relevant factor here. Back in 2020, the turnout was less because of the pandemic. As I’ve analysed, most countries have an even higher turnout on average, so we should aim for that percentage to be even higher in future elections,” he said.
He then continued: “The point is for people to understand that by going to the polls they can still influence their personal destiny. They need to be able to clearly connect the sphere of politics with their personal lives, and understand that one is related to the other. They mustn’t think that politics has nothing to do with them. We hope that this will improve. Although it isn’t shown in this way, going to the polls also shows concern for the state, so we could call it a form of patriotism.
the croatian parliamentary elections will be repeated in two locations
He emphasised that they received only one short report from the Interior Ministry (MUP) with only two reports of people disturbing public order and peace. Only on one occasion was an actual misdemeanor report filed.
“Regarding the violation of electoral silence, nothing went so far outside the framework of what is usual. Apart from that, maybe the politicians themselves deviated from the previous practice. This could be in the sense that they went to the polling stations and made certain statements, maybe they commented a little too much. This broke the election silence, there’s no sanctions for that, but it’s good that we respect it,” he said.
“During the Croatian parliamentary elections, perhaps for the first time, I had the subjective feeling that most people were happy to have a break from overheated polemics and discussions in the political space.”
As a whole, the elections were conducted normally. He then spoke about citizens who had to wait for a blue certificate to be given to them in order to vote because of expired ID cards:
“As for the voters who couldn’t vote due to problems with their identity cards, that isn’t the domain of the SEC. Identity cards are issued by the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Administration is responsible for voter records. However, we tried to mediate in that, too.”
A total of over 6,500 citizens had this sort of problem, of which in more than 4,000 cases the issue was down to invalid ID cards. With 2500 people, it was a system error.
SEC Vice President Josip Salapić said that the Croatian parliamentary elections will need to be repeated in two places because more ballots were found in the boxes than there should have been. This will take place in the Municipality of Sračinec, and it refers to the list of candidates in the 12th constituency, and in the Municipality of Markušica. This repeated voting will take place on Sunday, April the 21st.
