Kosovo held general elections on December 28 last year, the second in a year, as a last-ditch attempt to break out of political deadlock and institutional paralysis. The results showed that Kurti's Vetëvendosje party won, and will now be able to easily form a government.
In those days, it was said that there were no incidents or serious complaints of violations or irregularities during the voting. Everything seemed like a true triumph of democracy and proof that Kosovo society and politics had matured, at least in terms of organizing and holding elections.
But that enthusiasm waned three weeks after the election. Observers and polling station commissioners are usually cautious about counting party votes, but once the counting of party candidates begins, votes seem to be easily stolen.
This phenomenon was very prominent in these elections. It was revealed that dozens of commissioners had been massively stealing votes on behalf of some of the candidates. The scandal involved all the parties that participated in the elections, but the extent of the theft was more present in the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK). It turned out that a figure from this party, in Prizren, had been arbitrarily credited with over 6.000 votes.
He and everyone else like him had the excuse that they had nothing to do with this election crime and that they were simply “honored” by the commissioners' votes against their will. This is an unconvincing reasoning, but the final word belongs to the prosecutor.
That the votes were stolen "in kind" was an open secret, now exposed. In the post-war years, the methods of stealing votes and manipulating the results were different, and the scale of the theft was many times greater.
Until recently, voter lists were filled with the dead (jokes about the dead would circulate endlessly on election day), ballot boxes were changed at night and replaced with boxes filled with fictitious ballots, mass vote buying was recorded or votes were given in exchange for a bag of flour, and the like, the number of votes at polling stations was often several times higher than the number of voters, and so on and so forth.
There is one more detail worth mentioning in the latest industrial vote-stealing scandal. This character from Prizren, on whose account 6.000 votes were stolen, is an actor by profession, or rather an inactive actor. He was the director of the Prizren City Theater for almost ten years, and for the last five he has been receiving a salary from that theater as an actor, despite not having participated in a single play. Of course, he came to that position as a party militant.
Such parasites and fraudsters abound and receive almost no public attention until their greed becomes blatant (that is, when the theft figures rise to 6.000).
But the extent of the damage done to democracy and the future of this country, and the vote theft and extortion of the public budget (through a fictitious job), are crimes that must be held accountable. However, accountability is a serious sport, which Kosovo's institutions still do not handle properly.
(Translated from Albanian by Qerim Ondozi)
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