Instead of initiating reform with the purpose of preventing irregularities, reform was initiated with the purpose of creating multiple election districts and introduce direct elections for president. The Election Reform Committee made few improvements, ignored other important points, but even this modest draft was discarded by the powerful political leaders who restarted reform from scratch.
Political leaders reversed a number of previously accomplished improvements by the Committee but soon it ran into a deadlock itself. The leaders’ forum raised issues that had not been diagnosed as problematic before, which seem to cause the ire of some parties. Some previous achievements suffered setback, such as allowing the members of the Assembly to hold executive positions again.
The more the reform was delayed and elections neared, the higher the pressure on the opposition to withdraw from some of its demands. Regardless of their desire for early elections, they were afraid of holding these elections with the old law as it benefits the main party, as well as two other regionally powerful parties.
After few years of advice, verbal and through various reports, EU member states and the EU Office in Kosovo drafted a brief document urging the political leaders to accelerate electoral reform by including other stakeholders in the process as well as suggesting a series of improvements. The EU, inter alia, suggests the removal of the preferential vote, the use of black ink to mark voters, improve the reporting by the media, the timely holding of municipal elections, and more.
Other problems, such as school directors, composition of MECs, the removal of conditional voting and by-mail voting for local elections, the early publication of the voters’ list, the performance of the judiciary, clarification with regards to the documents that may be used to vote, were central to political leaders’ discussions and some of them were also mentioned in the EU’s memo.
Some of the decisions made by party leaders are in contradiction with EU best practices such as the decision to count votes at a municipal centre. Disputable elections, coupled with a controversial arbiter with dwindling credibility to resolute disputes, are a scenario that may lead to political violence.
In this publication, D4D presents two documents and describes the current the state of affairs with the purpose of feeding into the debate about electoral reform, which will likely commence immediately after the completion of upcoming municipal elections.
