The State Election Commission was waiting for the State Attorney’s Office to check HDZ’s claims that last year’s elections “were stolen”.
The State Election Commission has asked the National Archives to approve the destruction of ballots from parliamentary elections held in November last year, since the State Attorney’s Office has confirmed that it has not found any evidence for claims made by then HDZ president Tomislav Karamarko that his party had actually won, but that the elections were stolen, reports Index.hr on July 22, 2016.
The State Election Commission published on its website an official letter from the Zagreb County Attorney’s Office, which stated that “there is no obstacle for compliance with Article 11 of the Law on Archives”, because “we have not found any grounds for suspicion that a criminal offense has been committed”.
In January, at a party rally in Imotski, Karamarko said that during the election night HDZ “had indications that the HDZ-led Patriotic Coalition was robbed of five to six seats in Parliament”. Even though he did not give any specifics, evidence or reasons why he thought the elections were stolen, the State Election Commission officially filed a criminal complaint against an unknown perpetrator for possible election fraud, in order for the whole issue to be investigated. Karamarko later repeated the allegations several times, again without any specifics.
Although the electoral ballots are usually destroyed 60 days after the announcement of the official election results, the State Election Commission decided this time to wait for the State Attorney’s Office to investigate the issue and approve the destruction of ballots.
Conspiracy theories about the stolen elections of 2015 are even now regularly featured on right-wing fringe websites, with claims that SDP and then Prime Minister Zoran Milanović somehow prevented HDZ from achieving convincing victory at the elections. In focus of the allegations is the state-owned APIS IT company, which adds numbers of votes from various polling stations. However, since all the major parties, including HDZ, have their observers at individual polling places and also add the number of votes for each candidate list, fraud with adding up the number of votes is virtually impossible.
