Serbia's Old-Style Voting System Deemed 'Hack-Proof'

Ahead of the elections in the Serbian capital scheduled for March 4, Serbia's outdated voting system has one advantage: it is immune from potential hack attacks, experts say.

"The most susceptible system to hacking is the e-voting system, which Serbia doesn't have and will not have any time soon," Bojan Klacar, from the Center for Free Elections and Democracy, CeSid, told BIRN.

Serbia's voting system is not electronic and still involves pencil and paper. Serbians vote the old fashioned way, circling their favourite candidate or list on the paper ballot and then putting it into a ballot box.

After voting is done, all the ballots are counted, gathered into bags and then brought in to the central or city electoral commission, depending on the level of the election.

"The second challenge is to electronic voting machines, which Serbia also doesn't and will not have soon, either," Klacar explained, adding that a shift to electronic voting would also mean making changes to the country's electoral laws. "So there are no 'holes' in the Serbian system at this moment," he observed.

The Belgrade elections will be held on March 4. Associated Press published in November that hackers who allegedly disrupted the US presidential election last year targeted emails worldwide.

"The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that went back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users — from the pope's representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow," the AP report said, adding that targets were spread among 116 countries.

However, Andrej Petrovski, from the Share Foundation, an NGO, said the old...