SARAJEVO — Polls opened across Bosnia and Herzegovina on Sunday for general elections in which more than 3.4 million registered voters are eligible to choose the country’s presidency and hundreds of officials across multiple levels of government.
Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. local time and are scheduled to close at 7 p.m., according to the Central Election Commission (CIK).
A total of 3,414,364 people are registered to vote in the elections, held every four years, with 518 officials set to be elected.
Voters will choose the Bosniak, Croat and Serb members of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three-member presidency, as well as representatives to the state-level Parliamentary Assembly.
They will also elect lawmakers to the House of Representatives of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the National Assembly of Republika Srpska, the country’s two entities.
The elections will additionally determine the president and vice presidents of Republika Srpska and members of the Federation’s 10 cantonal assemblies.
Bosnia and Herzegovina operates under a complex political system established by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the 1992-1995 war. The country consists of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, alongside the self-governing Brcko District.
Ten candidates are competing for the three seats on the presidency. Voters in the Federation can vote for either the Bosniak or Croat member, while voters in Republika Srpska elect the Serb representative.
Incumbent Denis Becirovic, Bakir Izetbegovic, Semir Efendic and Fahrudin Radoncic are contesting the Bosniak seat.
Darijana Filipovic, Zdenko Lucic and Slaven Kovacevic are running for the Croat seat, while incumbent Zeljka Cvijanovic, Marinko Bozovic and Nebojsa Vukanovic are competing for the Serb seat.
Another 12 candidates are contesting the presidency of Republika Srpska.
The CIK approved 75 political parties, 29 coalitions and four independent candidates, with more than 7,000 candidacies registered across all levels of government.
Sunday’s election also marks the first nationwide use of new voting technology aimed at strengthening voter identification, ballot counting and the transmission of results.
Biometric voter verification, ballot scanners and video surveillance systems are being used at around 4,500 polling locations. Voters will undergo fingerprint verification after identity checks before casting paper ballots, which will be scanned before being placed in ballot boxes.
Data from the scanned ballots will be transmitted directly to the CIK, allowing preliminary and incomplete results to be announced at around 8 p.m., earlier than in previous elections.
Ballots will also be counted manually. The commission said additional checks would be conducted in cases of significant discrepancies between scanned and manually counted results, with the manual count considered official if discrepancies remain.
Bosnians living abroad are also participating, with 48,078 voters registered to cast ballots by mail.
Voting is taking place at 20 Bosnian diplomatic and consular missions across 13 countries, including Germany, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, the United States, Qatar and Jordan.
The number of registered voters is slightly higher than in the 2022 general elections, when 3.37 million people were on the electoral roll.
In 2022, Becirovic was elected as the Bosniak member of the presidency, Zeljko Komsic as the Croat member and Cvijanovic as the Serb member.
Source: Saudi Gazette