Democrats urge their supporters to vote for DSS-Dveri

Democrats urge their supporters to vote for DSS-Dveri

Addressing reporters, Pajtic said that although that coalition and his party are different in many ways, his appeal was made in order to defend democracy and Serbia from election theft, "and from one man who got it into his head he can usurp anything."

Opposition leaders today also called on citizens to join a protest scheduled for 13:00 CET on Saturday in front of RIK premises. Pajtic extended this invitation to some parties that are members of the pre-election coalition put together by the Progressives (SNS):

"We are also inviting Vuk Draskovic, Rasim Ljajic, and Velimir Ilic - with whom we 20 years ago fought against (election) theft, to join us in these protests."

Pajtic and DSS leader Sanda Raskovic-Ivic spoke at the Belgrade HQ of the DSS to say that the total number of "stolen votes" in the April 24 snap parliamentary election reaches 300,000 - and that election fraud unfolded in "different ways" - including the so-called Bulgarian train, various forms of pressure, and the changes made to records from polling stations.

The Democrats said earlier that the "Bulgarian train" vote-buying scheme means a voter is given a ballot paper with a list already circled before entering the polling station. This ballot is then cast, while the voter takes the empty, unused one out of the polling station as proof that they had voted "for those who paid them." The empty ballot is then marked and handed to the next participant in the fraud. Radulovic also said his movement had proof about irregularities concerning instances of "deceased persons voting" and "obviously forged" election records which he said the commission nonetheless accepted.

Raskovic-Ivic said that her coalition received 200,000 votes, but that SNS leader Aleksandar Vucic now plans to turn them all into his mandates, "to steal the will of the people."

"Our information is that 300,000 votes have been stolen, every single one attributed to the SNS," she said.

Raskovic-Ivic also accused RIK of becoming "an extended hand and an operative of the SNS," noting that even the legal deadline (96 hours after the closing of polling stations) to announce the final results had been violated.

"At work is a case of electoral-political engineering in order to bring down lists, especially that of Dveri-DSS. They have damaged us particularly, they would put a zero where we had between five and nine percent, and where we fared worse, regardless of the errors, they would verify the ballots," she said.

The DSS leader mentioned two examples for which she said she had proof: polling station number 5 in Kosovska Mitrovica, where ethnic Albanian voters "signed themselves using the Serbian Cyrillic script - and some even entered Serbian names" - and in polling station number 31 in Vranje, where records were altered to give the SNS 513 instead of the original 463 votes, reduce the number received by the DS from 82 to 54, while the DSS-Dveri list went from 231 to 52.

"What happened to us can happen to anyone tomorrow," Raskovic-Ivic concluded.