GONG campaign for parliamentary elections

Because of the Croatian parliamentary elections of 25 November 2007, GONG organized a nation-wide campaign. It was officially announced in October, although certain activities were conducted in the months before. The GONG campaign for the parliamentary elections focused on educating and informing citizens, observing the overall election process and reporting on its course.

Educating citizens

Due to recent changes in the election legislation and keeping in mind the substantial number of new (first time) voters, one part of GONG’s campaign was aimed at educating and informing citizens. Hopefully, the newly established National Election Commission will conduct such activities for all elections in the future, but for this election there was still a need for GONG to do this. With the aim to educate the youngest voters, GONG organized “I Vote for the First Time” workshops in high schools. It was the seventh season of this project; around 22 000 high school seniors were educated in 801 workshops organized in high schools all over the country. At the end of the workshop each student received two brochures: one about the elections and one about public advocacy.

Apart from these workshops, GONG also compiled an educational brochure, a guide to the election process. 850 000 copies were distributed through daily newspapers and by GONG activists. On top of this, two video and audio clips were produced and broadcasted in programs on national and local radio and TV stations in Croatia. Through these clips citizens were informed about a) the deadlines for checking data of the 'Voters’ lists'; b) registration for voting outside place of residence; and c) the Election Day. Additionally, on a redesigned GONG website several election guides and useful information regarding the election rules, election process and procedures were posted and GONG employees were answering thousands of inquiries from citizens and candidates by e-mail, phone or in person.

Observing the election process

GONG was not only observing election day, but also all the preparatory activities of the responsible state institutions, the pre-election campaign, the counting of votes and the conduct of post-election activities. After 10 years of working in the field of elections, GONG actually performed its last campaign in such manner and to such an extent. The final product will be a detailed report with recommendations to responsible state institutions on how to further improve the election process and election legislation. It is GONG’s wish to continue working on certain elements of the election process and legislation and not so much on observing the elections.

In the course of these recent parliamentary elections, GONG observed the work of all institutions involved in organizing and conducting the elections: National Election Commission, Central State Administration Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration and Croatian diplomatic and consular representations (DCRs) abroad. Two “Mystery Call” researches were organized in order to check the work of state administration offices and DCRs and findings were publicly announced. The aim of the research was to see whether the procedures of the previous registration of voters abroad and the procedure of temporary signing into the voters’ lists are being obeyed; to determine how well the officials of the responsible institutions were educated on the matter and to what extent the information on previous registration and temporary signing into the lists was available to the citizens. According to GONG findings, although the procedures were mainly obeyed, still there were certain problems and misconducts due to the inefficient education of the officials which caused for some citizens lose of the right to vote.

Also, GONG, in cooperation with Faculty of Political Science from Zagreb, conducted the “Add Watch” project of monitoring political messages during the pre-election campaign. The goal was to determine the type of messages that are being sent to the citizens during the campaign and to what extent these messages are informative. One of the interesting findings was that parties during the campaign actually discussed some of the issues which, according to recent research, are far from the ones which citizens find the most important, such as: unemployment, corruption, crime, health care, standard of living, agriculture, economy etc. While these issues were not discussed, many others that the public does not find crucially important were put on the agenda, for instance: new taxes, religious teaching in schools, drugs and the right to vote for the diaspora.

Keeping in mind that financing pre-election campaigns is still an important issue, GONG, in partnership with Transparency International Croatia, conducted the project of monitoring the spendings of political parties on advertising during campaign in order to make projections of overall costs of campaigns. According to the findings, the most was spent by the HDZ – 25 and a half million Kuna (3.5 million euros) – which is as much as all the other parties spent together! Since in this monitoring only some of the spending was monitored (advertising in national electronic and printed media, billboards and Internet portals), it can be concluded that the actual amount of money spent on the campaign is twice as much for each party, which makes an overall spending of around 100 million Kuna for the campaign.

On Election Day, 1500 of GONG observers monitored the election procedure at designated polling stations, 117 of them were stationed on polling stations abroad. Additionally, 65 mobile teams visited around 1000 of polling stations in Croatia and abroad (Bosnia and Herzegovina). GONG's general view is that Election Day went on in a democratic and tolerant atmosphere, but there were some problems noticed regarding the voting of members of national minorities. Also, it was noticed that not all of the members of election committees on polling stations were educated enough on the procedure so their professionalism ranged from bad to excellent. Additional problems were noticed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where some of the voters did not get a chance to vote due to the slow procedure of giving out the certificates to vote.

Also, during this election, GONG once again conducted the PVT – parallel vote tabulation project and compared the official results with the ones called in by GONG observers from the polling stations. The results GONG gathered are confirming the official results announced by the National Election Commission.

As the last thing regarding this election, GONG made an inquiry into the election material from polling stations abroad. According to the findings made through the inquiry, there were not any systematic breaches of election rules, but there were some problems caused mainly because of the inefficient education of members of the election committees on polling stations and because of the problems in the voters’ lists for Croatian citizens living abroad. Due to the legal impossibility for the responsible state bodies to clear up these lists, there are many people who died still listed. This gives space for possible manipulation, but we can not say that any kind of manipulation did actually occur.

Sandra Pernar, GONG

This article was published in Politeia Newsletter 47 - December 2007