Serbia’s electoral records contain significant discrepancies concerning voters administratively registered in Kosovo, raising questions about the accuracy of the data, the status of hundreds of thousands of entries and the distinction between registered residence and actual place of living.
According to Serbia’s publicly available electoral register, 115,865 voters were recorded across 23 administrative units in Kosovo as of October 19, 2026. However, findings published by the Serbian election-monitoring organization CRTA indicate that the central electoral database contains another 248,042 entries associated with six Kosovo municipalities that are not included in the public overview published by Serbia’s Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government.
The figures come from records with different scopes and cannot be added together to establish a verified total number of eligible voters. The status of the entries from the six municipalities in relation to the final electoral register for Serbia’s October 25 parliamentary elections remains unclear.
The available data also do not establish how recently the records were updated, how many registered citizens currently live in Kosovo or how many have been displaced.
Comparisons with earlier figures reveal further discrepancies. Serbia’s 2022 parliamentary election statistics recorded 93,527 voters associated with Kosovo, while an administrative overview published in October 2023 listed approximately 122,300. The latest public overview shows around 6,400 fewer voters than the 2023 administrative figure.
These differences do not necessarily indicate an equivalent change in the actual electorate, as election statistics and administrative records may cover different categories of citizens. They nevertheless raise questions about who is included in Serbia’s voter records for Kosovo and what the published figures represent.
248,042 Entries From Six Municipalities Remain Unexplained
According to findings from members of Serbia’s Electoral Register Audit Commission published by CRTA, the central Unified Electoral Register contains 248,042 entries associated with Đakovica, Suva Reka, Glogovac, Kačanik, Deçan and Štimlje.
CRTA says these municipalities have not been included in the organization of elections or in publicly available electoral-register data since 2012. The commission has reportedly not been provided with a clear legal basis for this arrangement.
Commission member Ognjen Rašuo previously raised the issue, citing a total of 248,035 entries across the six municipalities — seven fewer than the figure published by CRTA. The discrepancy has not been explained in the reviewed sources.
According to Rašuo, voters from these municipalities are listed under polling station number one, marked as “unassigned,” and no extracts from the electoral register are printed for them. He said a request for clarification had been submitted to the relevant authorities but that no response had been received at the time of his comments.
Rašuo suggested that the records might not be regularly updated, an assessment also raised by CRTA.
A separate investigation published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on October 15 identified additional data-quality concerns in publicly available records relating to voters from Kosovo.
The investigation found 349 combinations of first name, surname and parent’s name repeated at the same polling station. More than 700 identical names appeared at two polling stations, 32 at three polling stations and one at five.
The review also found more than 3,800 records missing a parent’s name, over 2,500 names written using a mixture of Cyrillic and Latin characters, and hundreds of spelling errors.
However, repeated names alone do not establish that the same person has been registered more than once. These findings concerned the broader publicly available dataset for voters associated with Kosovo and were not limited to the six municipalities.
According to CRTA, the decision finalizing the electoral register on October 9 for the October 25 elections does not include polling stations in those six municipalities, despite the entries remaining in the central database.
This does not establish the status of every individual entry or prove that a person recorded in one of the municipalities could not have been assigned to vote elsewhere.
Rašuo previously cited 6,696,433 entries in the broader database, including approximately 248,000 associated with the six municipalities. By contrast, Serbia’s final electoral register for the October elections contained 6,450,523 voters.
The difference may partly reflect the different scope of the records, but it cannot be fully explained without additional information because the figures also refer to different dates. The 248,042 entries therefore cannot be treated as an additional number of voters eligible to participate in the October elections.
Why the Official Figures Differ
Differences between election statistics and administrative records cannot automatically be interpreted as increases or decreases in the number of eligible voters.
A finalized electoral register for a specific election and a public administrative overview based on registered residence may include different categories of citizens.
Political scientist Vujo Ilić raised this possibility in 2023, telling Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that some discrepancies could be connected to internally displaced people who retained registered residence in Kosovo but voted according to their place of temporary residence in central Serbia.
He emphasized that this was a possible explanation rather than a confirmed finding, as no official clarification had been made available.
Comparing the October 2023 administrative overview of approximately 122,300 voters with the October 19, 2026 figure of 115,865 shows a decline of around 6,400, or approximately 5.3 percent.
An earlier public overview published on October 12, 2026, listed 115,856 voters. The nine-entry difference between the two October figures cannot be explained using the publicly available aggregate data alone.
Rašuo offered another possible explanation, telling RFE/RL on October 15 that some voters had previously been registered according to temporary residence in central Serbia and were subsequently returned to the records associated with their registered residence in Kosovo when that temporary residence expired.
These explanations point to possible administrative reasons for the discrepancies. However, without confirmation that the datasets cover identical categories, and without information about changes of residence, deaths and new registrations, the causes cannot be established reliably.
Registered Residence Does Not Establish Where People Actually Live
Serbia’s Unified Electoral Register is not a record of ethnic identity. It contains citizens who meet the legal requirements for voting.
Consequently, the number of voters registered as residing in Kosovo cannot be equated with the number of ethnic Serbs currently living there.
According to the Ministry’s October 19 overview, 6,899 voters were registered in the administrative unit of Gora. The public data do not identify their ethnicity or establish how many currently live in the area.
Decades of displacement further complicate the picture.
CRTA reported that 18,320 decisions had been issued allowing voters to cast ballots according to their place of temporary residence in Serbia during the 2026 electoral process, compared with 13,322 in 2023. Approximately one-third of the decisions issued in 2026 concerned voters whose registered residence was in Kosovo.
These figures do not, however, establish the total number of displaced citizens.
Peja provides another illustration of the difference between administrative registration and actual residence. The Ministry’s October 19 overview listed 3,979 voters associated with Peja. In December 2023, Darko Kolašinac, then head of the municipality’s provisional body, told RFE/RL that approximately 700 to 800 voters lived permanently in the area.
The two figures represent different types of information and refer to different periods: one is an administrative record, while the other is a local estimate. They cannot be directly compared.
Serbia’s administrative division of Kosovo also does not fully correspond to Kosovo’s current municipal boundaries. Without a clear distinction between registered residence, temporary residence and actual place of living, the number of registered voters currently residing in Kosovo cannot be reliably established.
Voting Rights and Access to Polling Stations
According to CRTA’s analysis of the finalized electoral register, 100,413 voters from 22 administrative units in Kosovo were eligible to vote at 60 polling stations in Raška, Tutin, Kuršumlija and Vranje in Serbia’s October 25 parliamentary elections.
Serbia’s Republic Electoral Commission designated nine more polling stations than for the 2023 elections, when 51 were available.
Meanwhile, the Ministry’s October 19 administrative overview listed 115,865 voters across 23 administrative units in Kosovo.
The figures cover different records and cannot be treated as directly equivalent. Their difference does not, by itself, prove that anyone has been denied the right to vote.
Serbia’s electoral commission has reportedly justified organizing voting outside Kosovo by saying that Kosovo institutions prevent Serbian parliamentary elections from being held there. This is the commission’s stated explanation, rather than an independently established account of the cause.
Holding elections outside Kosovo requires voters to travel, potentially creating additional financial and practical obstacles. Zoran Spasić, from Rabovc, told RFE/RL that voting in Kuršumlija would require him to spend almost an entire day travelling.
The fact that polling stations are located outside Kosovo does not itself prove that voting rights have been denied. However, it raises questions about accessibility, particularly for older people, people with disabilities and voters without private transport.
The right to vote therefore needs to be considered alongside the practical conditions under which citizens can exercise it.
Audit Powers Exist, but Key Questions Remain
Under Serbia’s Law on the Unified Electoral Register, the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government maintains the register, while municipal and city administrations carry out delegated updating tasks.
Amendments to the law also established the powers of the Electoral Register Audit Commission, which can analyse data, check consistency against other records and examine procedures for updating the register.
Despite these responsibilities, the status of the 248,042 entries associated with the six Kosovo municipalities remains unresolved.
The reviewed sources do not establish a specific legal basis for their exclusion from the public overview and the organization of polling stations, nor do they provide complete information about how recently the records were updated or how they relate to the finalized electoral register.
On October 9, Serbia’s Office for Information Technologies and Electronic Government announced that an analysis based on data as of September 1, 2026, found at least 98 percent correspondence between the Unified Electoral Register and information from the Interior Ministry’s residence records and civil birth and death registers.
However, the publicly presented results did not provide separate figures for Kosovo or clarify whether the entries from the six municipalities were included in the verification.
On October 16, the Electoral Register Audit Commission distanced itself from the presentation of those results, stating that the Office’s findings had not been obtained through consistent application of the methodology established by the commission.
It also emphasized that statements by individual members do not automatically constitute official findings of the commission as a whole.
The electoral register was finalized before the audit was completed. Commission members appointed on CRTA’s proposal warned that a report scheduled for October 28, three days after the election, would not constitute a comprehensive verification of the register’s accuracy, completeness and integrity, but would instead present findings from partial checks.
According to CRTA, the commission was not given the opportunity to conduct a full independent verification of polling-station extracts before the election.
Institutions Must Provide Verifiable Answers
The available findings point to a need for Serbia’s relevant institutions to provide clear, verifiable explanations about how electoral records associated with Kosovo are maintained.
The Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government should clarify the status of the 248,042 entries from the six municipalities, the legal basis for their exclusion from the public overview, the dates and methods of their latest updates, and their relationship to the finalized electoral register for the October 25 elections.
The Electoral Register Audit Commission should address these records in its findings, clearly outlining its methodology, the scope of its checks and the limitations of the available data.
A fuller understanding of the electorate associated with Kosovo would also require comparable aggregate data distinguishing voters by registered residence and temporary residence, while protecting personal information.
Equally important is ensuring that citizens, particularly displaced people, have clear information about their registration status, how to check their details and how to vote.
The question of who Serbia’s voters from Kosovo actually are cannot be resolved simply by comparing figures drawn from different databases. The available records reveal discrepancies, but do not establish how many registered citizens currently live in Kosovo, how many have been displaced or what the status of every entry is within the electoral process.
The unexplained entries from the six municipalities are a particularly important issue. Their presence in the central database, alongside their absence from the public overview and the finalized register’s polling-station arrangements, requires a clear explanation from the relevant authorities.
Differences between databases do not, on their own, prove electoral irregularities or abuse. But without complete and verifiable explanations, independent observers and the public cannot fully assess the relationship between the central database, the public administrative overview and the finalized electoral register.
Institutional accountability means not only maintaining electoral records, but also explaining what the published figures represent. Until those answers are provided, the question of who Serbia’s voters registered in Kosovo actually are remains unresolved.
