Under threat of protestors, SEC reject complaints!

At today’s session, the State Election Commission will decide whether there will be a rerun at polling station 396/1 in Gostivar, in the Second electoral unit. According to the data – on whether votes from that polling station could affect the election results, the SEC will decide whether there will be a rerun.

“A rerun is carried out if the total number of registered voters in the polling station where the voting has been annulled, affect the overall result for the electoral unit. In this case, there are a total of 892 registered voters in the polling station in Electoral unit 6, therefore an additional simulation needs to be made on whether those 892 voters would affect the results, or the distribution of mandates for Electoral unit 6”, stated yesterday SEC spokesperson Ljupka Gugucevska.

In Electoral unit 6, the difference between VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM is 307 votes.

According to the President of the SEC, Aleksandar Cicakovski, the session was interrupted due to security reasons, so SDSM’s last complaint will be reviewed today.

Yesterday the SEC, at the session that started with a two-and-a-half-hour delay, accepted BESA’s complaint with six votes “for” and three votes “against, and annulled the voting at one polling station in Gostivar, where another person had signed in place of Fatime Sulejmani, which was determined with the expertise of a graphologist.

The State Election Commission unanimously rejected SDSM’s complaint concerning the procedure for determining the results of the voting in polling station 2016, after insight was made in the entire election material by opening the bag with ballots and by determining that the number of votes corresponds to the minutes of the polling station.

The coalition led by SDSM filed eight complaints, five were rejected by the SEC and two were withdrawn by the representative of SDSM and the coalition.

During the entire two-day work, the SEC was exposed to pressure from the crowd that was protesting in front of the building, from where gunshots, firecrackers and fireworks echoed, and next to the barrels in which fire was burning from a truck with firewood that was donated by an unknown donor to the protestors, participants in the protests sang, chanted, made threats and sent a message that they were defending Macedonia. Some were drinking rakija and were dancing in the cold weather, while others were responding to journalists saying they were defending Macedonia.

Several hundreds of supporters from VMRO-DPMNE came to Skopje from several cities, as they have said, to express their anger over the work of the SEC. According to unconfirmed information of certain media, some of them have slept in empty beds of medical institutions, while others have spent the nights in the buses with which they came to the capital. The building in which the offices of the SEC are located in, yesterday was under strong police security, by a hundred members of the Rapid Deployment Unit, whereas the tense atmosphere was also threatened with an attempt to penetrate the police cordon at one time, especially following the threatening tones that were made by some of the speakers and officials of VMRO-DPMNE, who with threats “fueled” the discontent among the crowd.

Former Minister Dime Spasov said that there would be protesters in front of the SEC today as well, and Nikola Todorov from VMRO-DPMNE held a press conference last night expressing doubts regarding the reported irregularities in the Sixth Electoral Unit: “This is the electoral engineering for which we were warning as VMRO-DPMNE. This is the scenario of a post-electoral engineering, which needs to be realized according to someone’s order”.