RIK to rule on Student List complaint most likely on Friday

In brief

• The RIK session on the Student List complaint is most likely on Friday, said commission member Tanasije Marinkovic.
• Marinkovic cites a 72-hour deadline, while Dusan Dincic cites 48 hours.
• The complaint challenges the decisions on polling stations abroad and on voting hours, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Serbian time.
• The unified voter register for the October 25 elections closes tonight at midnight.

The unified voter register for the October 25 parliamentary elections closes today, October 9, at midnight. On the same day, according to Tanasije Marinkovic, a member of the Republic Electoral Commission (RIK), the commission will most likely hold the session at which it decides on the Student List complaint about voting abroad. As of this writing, no RIK decision on the complaint has been published.

What does the Student List dispute?

The complaint was filed on Wednesday evening, during a protest rally in front of the RIK building. It challenges two decisions: the one setting the polling stations abroad and the one setting when voting starts and ends. RIK adopted the Foreign Ministry’s proposal that all polling stations abroad open at 7 a.m. Serbian time and close at 8 p.m.

Because of time zone differences, that means voting in the middle of the night for voters in parts of the world. The Student List said in a statement:

“Our citizens in America and Australia are officially being forced to vote in the middle of the night (at 1 and 2 a.m.), while dozens of polling stations around the world and entire regions have definitively been wiped off the election map”

According to the same statement, about 12,000 voters will be forced to vote during the night. Voting abroad takes place at 93 polling stations, 12 more than in December 2023, when there were 81, with 39,270 registered voters. According to figures cited by Danas, the number of registered voters has now passed 100,000.

What is the deadline for the RIK decision?

Two members of the commission give different deadlines. Marinkovic told the FoNet agency that RIK has 72 hours to decide, so the session will most likely be held on Friday. Dincic told Danas that RIK decides on the complaint within 48 hours, and added:

“If the Republic Electoral Commission rejects the complaint, there is still the right of appeal to the Administrative Court, which has an additional 72 hours to resolve it”

Dincic considers the Student List complaint well founded, but notes that RIK decides by majority vote.

What does Marinkovic say about the Foreign Ministry?

Marinkovic claims the proposal to amend the decision came from the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday, but that it only specifies the 93 polling stations already determined. He gave FoNet the example of Lyon:

“However, just before the session they sent changes to that act only in terms of specifying the decision on the already determined 93 polling stations, which is questionable in itself because, for example, citizens asked the embassy to open a polling station in Lyon, and the Ministry sends them to Strasbourg, although Paris is much closer to Lyon”

A meeting with the Ministry was officially requested for Thursday, but no answer has arrived. At the six meetings held so far, Marinkovic says, Foreign Ministry representatives came without the requested data:

“We ask for that at every meeting: give us your data as of today, how many citizens have requested their right to vote, in which places, and give us confirmation that you have approached the host country with a request to allow the opening of new polling stations outside diplomatic and consular missions”

Marinkovic assesses that the decision can technically be changed. He says that “all that is needed is the good will of the institutions and the Foreign Ministry, which can always submit a proposal to amend and supplement the existing decision”. At the same time he warns of possible consequences:

“We have made it probable that what they are doing is discrimination, and potentially a criminal offense”

On voting hours he also said: “The voting time set for abroad is utterly illogical to common sense, but it is logical when you look at it from the angle of potential criminal activity. This is a small but very important illustrative example where you see political discrimination”. He also announced a possible next step: “It now seems to me that after these elections we will have to turn to the European Court of Human Rights as well”.

Marinkovic also drew attention to voting outside polling stations. According to him, the number of such voters rose sharply over the last two election cycles, and in the 2025 local elections it doubled:

“That incredible growth in the number of voters outside the polling station, over 100,000 voters in 2023, is about 2.6% of the total number of voters who voted, almost one whole census”

What does the other side say?

The lead candidate of the United Serbia list, Aleksandar Vucic, said on Informer television that the state enabled citizens abroad to vote even though it is not obliged to, and that the times differ only in some countries:

“So voting will take place during the hours in Serbia, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. So that you understand this is not a manipulation”

Vucic linked voting in different time zones to the election silence period. Dincic replied to Danas that this reasoning makes no sense and that, by law, social networks are not media. According to him:

“What is forbidden, what the law says, is publicly releasing results from abroad before voting ends in Serbia. That is what the law says is forbidden”

Dincic added that this may have happened once or twice, but that this is no reason for everyone to vote at the same time as Serbia. In the 2023 elections, voters in Canada, the United States, Portugal and the United Kingdom voted a day earlier, on December 16, precisely because of the time difference.

What about the voter register that closes at midnight?

The revision of the voter register has not been carried out, says Ognjen Rasuo, a member of the Voter Register Revision Commission on behalf of the Green-Left Front and a lawyer. According to him, the commission received the register in electronic form in July, while some records, such as the records of identity cards and death registries, it never received. Rasuo cites the example of the 183 oldest citizens in the register, none of whom has a valid identity card, with the oldest last having had one issued in 1983.

The exact number of deceased people in the register, he says, cannot be known:

“That is one of the first questions raised in our commission. However, the position of the ruling majority was that these people are in fact alive for the Serbian legal order, and that we cannot establish anything on that matter, even though we have, for example, access to some other databases on the basis of which we could establish that these persons are in fact not alive”

Rasuo also told N1 that in the pilot project in Sevojno they got results showing that “10, 20 percent of people who hold our citizenship cannot be found”, because they cannot be found in the citizenship registers by personal ID number.