CeSID At Local Elections in Serbia 2004

On Sunday September 19th local elections for councillors, presidents of municipalities and mayors will be held in almost 160 municipalities in Serbia.

Due to vast scope and complexity of the procedure of conducting the local elections on the entire territory of Serbia, CeSID will not monitor these elections in a usual manner.

Instead, this time CeSID opted to conduct two projects to provide the public in a unique way with all relevant information on these local elections.

Within the project “Guide Through New Local Self-Government”, CeSID has prepared a comprehensive interactive database comprising information on all candidates for councillors, presidents of municipalities and mayors in Serbia. Access to this database is provided via CeSID web site.

Upon completion of the elections, this database will be updated with relevant information on all directly elected bodies of local self-government, as well as on those elected indirectly (vice presidents of municipalities, city architects, ombudsmen, administration commissioners).

So far, a project like this one has not been realised by any state institution in Serbia.

Within the other project, with support of the OSCE, CeSID has organised monitoring of the local elections in the City of Belgrade and presentation of information on the course of voting, estimated voters turnout during the elections day and, right after the closing of polling stations, estimated results of elections for the Mayor and Assembly of the City of Belgrade.

CeSID believes these elections will have a great significance for the citizens of Serbia since they will have an opportunity to decide about persons and programmes which will directly affect the quality of their everyday life. For these reasons, CeSID encourages the citizens to massively turn out in these elections since, in that way, they will decide who will be dealing with their basic needs and in which manner.

On this occasion, CeSID also organised a motivational campaign sending 500,000 direct mail letters and appealing to the citizens to turn out in these elections.

On the elections day, Sunday September 19th, CeSID will hold regular pres conferences at the Media Centre in Belgrade at 09:55, 14:55 and 17:5 hours, as well as from 20:00 hours on. At these press conferences, President of CeSID Board of Directors Zoran Lucic and spokesman Marko Blagojevic will present to the media possible observed irregularities in the electoral process, estimated voters turnout during the day and, after the closing of polling stations, estimated results of local elections and elections for the Mayor and councillors in the Assembly of the City of Belgrade.