Illegal Procurement Procedure for Voting Booths

Transparency Serbia has submitted an initiative to the Public Procurement Office to determine whether the Republic Electoral Commission violated the law in procuring voting booths.

TS pointed out that the public procurement procedure was initiated even though it was not included in the annual procurement plan, and there are no grounds of urgency that would have made it impossible to plan the procurement in advance.

According to the information available, the contracting authority decided to conduct the procurement through a negotiated procedure without publication of a public call, even though the legal requirements for such a procedure had not been met.

The condition for using the least transparent public procurement procedure would be “urgency caused by events that the contracting authority could not have foreseen,” making it impossible to apply an open procedure.

At the same time, the Public Procurement Law explicitly states that the circumstances invoked by the contracting authority to justify “extreme urgency” must not have been caused by its own actions.

As can be seen from the partially available Decision to Initiate the Procedure, the REC justified the urgency by stating that, at its session on 24 August, it had adopted instructions on the design of voting booths to ensure the secrecy of voting, and that this had been done “with the aim of fulfilling ODIHR recommendations.” It further states that “there is no possibility of meeting the deadlines” prescribed for other types of procedures “if the elections are held by the end of October.”

However, the ODIHR recommendations referred to by the REC have been known since the ODIHR election report on the December 2023 elections. This means that the REC had two and a half years at its disposal to address this issue, and that the urgency was caused by the actions, or rather, inaction, of the contracting authority itself.

Moreover, setting a deadline of “by the end of October,” by which time “the elections would be held,” is questionable, since regular parliamentary elections should be held in December 2027. Holding early parliamentary elections would require the Government to submit a reasoned proposal to the President of the Republic for the dissolution of the National Assembly, with the President accepting that proposal; alternatively, the Prime Minister would have to be dismissed or resign, and Parliament would then fail to elect a new Government within 30 days, or the President of the Republic would have to resign. None of these circumstances have occurred, meaning that there is no formal basis for conducting an urgent public procurement through a negotiated procedure. There have only been announcements by Aleksandar Vučić, President of the Republic, that early parliamentary elections will be held on 18 or 25 October 2026. By comparison, the budget revision that the National Assembly, expected to be adopted shortly, does not provide for funds for conducting early parliamentary elections, because doing so would be contrary to the law, as the elections have not yet been called.

Even if these announcements were considered a valid basis for conducting the procurement through a negotiated procedure, the conditions for such a procedure would still not be met on another ground. Since the same person (Aleksandar Vučić) has repeatedly announced early parliamentary and/or presidential elections for different periods in 2026, the contracting authority missed the opportunity to adopt the necessary acts and subsequently conduct the public procurement earlier this year.

For this reason, TS called on the Public Procurement Office to conduct monitoring without delay and subsequently take measures within its remit to ensure that the public procurement is conducted in accordance with the law and to prevent potential damage to the budget resulting from restrictions on competition in the procurement procedure and reduced transparency in its implementation.