Kosovo Orders Partial Recount of General Election Votes

Kosovo's Election Complaints and Appeals Panel, ECAP, said on Monday that votes from more than half of the polling stations in the country must be recounted, and declared that votes that were sent from Serbia were invalid.

ECAP's decision to recount votes from 1,472 out of 2,547 polling stations and to invalidate the votes from Serbia came after dozens of complaints from several electoral list, including a coalition of three parties, NISMA (Social Democratic Initiative), the New Kosovo Alliance (AKR) and the Justice Party (PD).

In the initial count, the NISMA-AKR-PD coalition had received less than five per cent of the total votes at the October 6 elections, not enough to pass the threshold to get into parliament.

"ECAP has received 53 grounded complaints and based on them, the panel has decided in relation to 52 complaints to order the Central Election Committee to recount ballots at 1,472 polling stations," ECAP's decision said.

It added that ECAP has decided to accept the complaint submitted by the NISMA-AKR-PD coalition and has ordered the Central Election Commission to remove from the final election result the ballots of voters from Serbia.

The NISMA-AKR-PD coalition had complained about the way the votes were sent from Serbia.

Unlike in previous years, when the OSCE was in charge of delivering ballots from Serbia, this time the papers were brought to Kosovo by Serbian officials.

Political parties and Kosovo civil society organisations complained that this was illegal because diaspora votes are supposed to be sent by post.

During the attempt to count votes from Serbia, 26 officials from the Electoral Commission claimed they were poisoned by the envelopes in which the ballots were contained.

The accusations...