Artistic vote theft

In the scandal of industrial vote theft, during these recent elections, there is another small detail that is worth mentioning. The guy from Prizren, on whose behalf those 6,000 or so votes were stolen, is an actor by profession, an inactive actor, to be more precise. He was for about 10 years the director of the Prizren City Theater...

On December 28 of last year, general elections were held in Kosovo, for the second time in a year, as a final attempt to break out of the political deadlock and institutional paralysis. The results gave Kurti’s “Vetëvendosje” the victory, which will now easily be able to form a government. The Central Election Commission (CEC), after the closing of the polling stations that night, came out with preliminary results in record time. It was rumored in those days, and it was written everywhere, that no incidents were recorded during the voting, and there were no serious complaints of violations or irregularities. Everything seemed like a true triumph of democracy and proof that Kosovar society and politics have matured and become emancipated, at least in terms of organizing and holding elections.

However, this enthusiasm faltered after about three weeks of the elections. Observers and commissioners at polling stations are usually vigilant in counting votes for parties, but then when the counting of votes for candidates within a party begins, it seems that vote theft easily occurs, on behalf of this or that candidate. This phenomenon was particularly evident in these elections. It was learned that dozens of commissioners had massively stolen votes on behalf of some of the candidates. The scandal involved all the parties participating in the elections, but the massiveness of the theft was most present in the Democratic Party of Kosovo. It turned out that a guy from this party in Prizren had been arbitrarily credited with over 6,000 votes. He and all the others like him argued that they had nothing to do with this electoral crime, and that they, without their will, had simply been “rented” those votes by the election commissioners. Unconvincing reasoning, however, the prosecution, which has already been activated, will have the final say.

That the votes “within the species” were stolen was known, it was an “open secret”, but now it has been exposed. At least that is what was often heard these days. In the post-war years, the methods of stealing votes and manipulating the results were diverse and the scale of the thefts was many times greater. Voter lists were until recently filled with dead people (jokes about the dead coming back to life on voting day circulated endlessly), ballot boxes were changed at night and replaced with boxes filled with fictitious votes, massive vote buying was recorded or votes were given in exchange for a sack of flour (or similar), the number of votes in polling stations often turned out to be several times greater than the number of voters, and so on, and so on.

But, in this scandal of industrial vote theft, during these last elections, there is also a small detail that is worth mentioning. The guy from Prizren, on whose behalf those 6,000 or so votes were stolen, is an actor by profession, an inactive actor, to be more precise. He has been the director of the Prizren City Theater for about 10 years, and for the last five years he has been receiving a salary, in that theater, as an actor, despite not being involved in any performances. Of course, he came to that position as a party militant, and as such, he has continued to receive a salary for all these years. There are plenty of such abusive parasites and they hardly catch the eye of the media and the public, until perhaps when their malice becomes monumental (that is, when the theft figures reach 6,000+). But given the extent of the damage done to democracy and the future of this country, both vote theft and the extortion of the public budget (through a fictitious job) are equally criminal acts for which accountability must be sought. However, accountability is a difficult sport, which Kosovo institutions do not yet properly master!

This text was originally published in "Novosti" of Zagreb

Published in Albanian with permission from the author.