Rapajić Moran: administrative obstacles to the diaspora vote, only 1% can vote

BELGRADE – Ivana Rapajić Moran, a candidate on the “Evropska Srbija” (European Serbia) list and also chair of the Srbija centar party’s diaspora committee, warned tonight of accumulated problems and administrative obstacles faced by Serbian citizens abroad when registering to vote in the early parliamentary elections of October 25, as Danas.rs reports.

The deadline for registering to vote abroad ends on October 3 at midnight, Serbian time. According to Rapajić Moran, the small number of decisions issued so far for voting abroad is not a reason for pride but a disheartening figure: with 2 to 4 million people in the diaspora, enabling barely 1% of them to vote is “a catastrophically poor result” and a direct denial of a constitutional right, Danas quotes her as saying.

She called the registration system outdated, complicated and burdened with bureaucracy. According to Danas’s reporting, citizens are forced to go through complex procedures — from verification in the Unified Voter Register, to printing and filling in forms by hand, scanning, reading ID cards through technically difficult applications and merging documents.

The first goal of their diaspora programme is the introduction of electronic voting and postal voting, together with the modernisation of the e-Uprava portal, she announced tonight, as Danas.rs reports. Rapajić Moran added that the diaspora brings into Serbia 5 to 10 billion euros a year through remittances — about 7% of GDP — and should not be treated as an “administrative burden”, but as an equal participant in decision-making.