One district, one vote

Prishtina, 16 December – Kosovo should remain one electoral district, voting should be done with open lists, the voters should only vote for one candidate, and the threshold to enter the Parliament should be natural, are the recommendations that KIPRED Institute prefers to take place in the electoral code of Kosovo, presented in the press conference held on Friday, December 16, 2011, in Prishtina.

KIPRED Institute is one of the main monitoring entities of the Kosovo electoral system, and now as a representative of the civil society is also part of the process for improving the elections in Kosovo.

KIPRED has analyzed in detail the proposed changes so far and has studied the impact these changes would have on the whole election process, including the changes that would take place in the composition of the Assembly, the regional representation, the number of votes necessary for electing one deputy and the threshold to enter the parliament. From these studies, which are presented in the latest KIPRED report “Modeling of the Assembly of Kosovo with Election Zones,” KIPRED has derived its recommendations which have been forwarded to the Ad-Hoc Committee on Amending the Law on General Elections in the Republic of Kosovo.

KIPRED’s modeling study shows that the partition of Kosovo in electoral districts will not affect the composition of the Assembly significantly. While it would ensure regional representation in the Kosovo Assembly, electoral districting would, at the same time, make the race of entering the Assembly unequal, since the threshold for members of the Assembly would change from one district to another. More precisely, candidates running in Peja district would have to ensure more votes to enter the Assembly than the candidates running in Prizren district. Therefore, electoral districts do not seem like a solution that would help the democratic race in Kosovo.

As an important amendment, according to KIPRED, is that voters only vote for one candidate; instead of 10 candidates as in 2007, or 5 candidates as they did in 2010 elections. If the voters have only one candidate to chose, then they will have the opportunity to vote for their regional appointees to represent them in the Kosovo Assembly. Voting with 5 votes has been one of the main “instruments” for electoral fraud and manipulation in the 2010 elections and removing this opportunity will automatically abolish the opportunity for manipulation of the votes. Moreover, this would make the voting easier for the voters.

KIPRED also recommends that the lists are open and that the threshold for entering the Assembly of Kosovo is natural. This would ensure a more just representation of all groups or individuals and would open the elections for other actors, apart from the big parties that dominate the Kosovo political scene. KIPRED believe that these are the easiest and most useful changes that would ensure a better and fairer election process in Kosovo.