Macedonia's Voting List Oddities Spark Fraud Fears

According to data confirmed by the State Electoral Commission, a single municipality in the capital, Skopje, Gazi Baba, is home to more than 30 people who are over 100 years old.

This and other peculiarities on Macedonia's electoral roll are generating opposition concerns about whether the voting list is as "clean" as officials claim, ahead of June 5 general elections.

Emilija Kiprovska, spokesperson for Gazi Baba municipality, home to about 72,000 residents, was surprised by the news. “We are aware of several elderly residents aged 94 or 95 and if there is someone over 100 the municipality would be glad to help him or her to vote,” she said.

One explanation is that some of these people are deceased but no one has reported their deaths, the vice-president of the Electoral Commission, Subhi Jakupi, said.

“But we cannot claim for sure that someone who is on the list [aged 100 or more] is definitely dead,” he added.

Macedonia’s main opposition Social Democrats are already accusing Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his VMRO DPMNE-led coalition of trying to lay ground for electoral fraud on June 5.

“We are sure that if the electoral roll is properly checked, it will show up many other inconsistencies," Dane Taleski, a member of the Social Democrats' presidency, said. The news from Gazi Baba “only feeds our suspicions [of potential fraud]," he added.

The electoral role, which in 2008 counted 1,779.000 voters, has been a matter of controversy for some time. The OSCE, which has monitored Macedonia's past elections, describes it as unusually large for a country of just over 2 million people.

The OSCE said it suspected the roll contained various fictional or deceased voters and urged officials to check the list in order to diminish suspicions of possible election fraud.

But in February, after Justice Minister Mihajlo Manevski claimed that the electoral roll had been cleaned up, it contained more voters than ever, at 1,792,000. On Tuesday, the Electoral Commission added some 43,000 more, bringing total the figure to 1,835,000.