Third Annual Conference in Sarajevo

Page 15

During discussion, the fact has been established that Municipal Election Commissions in Bosnia and Herzegovina carry out their legal obligations in very different conditions, and that is the main reason why Municipal Election Commissions have developed many ways how to reach personnel for conduct of elections on the level of Polling Station Committees as the highest authority for conduct of elections.

The most frequently mentioned ways of identifying candidates for members of Polling Station Committees in our six workshops were the following:

• Usage of past experience and official records that Municipal Election Commission has at its disposal
• Proposals received from political parties, student and youth organizations, local communities, registry office
• Public calls through media with higher or lower level of assessment of required skills, through records from the Unemployment Bureau, non-governmental organizations and others.

The conclusion of Workshops concerning this issue is not exclusive, on the contrary it suggests that all manners of identifying candidates for Polling Station Committees that proved to be good in concrete cases should apply in the future, anyway social arguments shouldn't prevail but professional, working and experience arguments should prevail during selection of the members of Polling Station Committees.

Talking about criteria for selection of members of Polling Station Committees, besides legal criteria, those criteria were mentioned most frequently:
• That voters have confidence in members of Polling Station Committees because they know them from the past, meaning that they are from the area of the polling station where they have been chosen as the members of the Polling Station Committee
• That there is certain number of members with experience in each Polling Station Committee referring mostly to the president and his deputy.
• President and Deputy President should have skills of good organization of work as well as communication with voters, observers and others.
• Adequate gender representation desirable
• Multiethnicity is emphasized although it is legal category now.

Participants of the Workshop reached consensus most easily regarding the issue of minimum qualifications required for members of Polling Station Committees. That is secondary school, and only in special circumstances when this condition could not be fulfilled candidates who don't meet this requirement could be chosen.

Talking about idea of competition with testing of candidates for position of members of the Polling Station Committees, it has been agreed that in current circumstances it would be very difficult to organize typical competition with some standardized knowledge tests or skill tests for selection of members of Polling Station Committees, especially in the case of large municipalities where the number of members of Polling Station Committee is almost one thousand or more.

However, in all workshops, idea, which has already been enacted, whose essence is public invitation to all interested voters to apply to MEC as candidates for position of the members of Polling Station Committees was supported. Certainly, they have to meet requirements mentioned in the public invitation, through local media or in any other way.

At the end, by summing up all those criteria I mentioned shortly, we have tried to present ideal Polling Station Committee which could or should be our aim. This is the general idea of this ideal Polling Station Committee.

All members of Polling Station Committees enjoy confidence of their voters since they mostly know each other as they are coming from the area of polling station where they have been appointed, they all have minimum education required and it showed up that they can perform their job successfully. Polling Station Committee has equal gender representation, different age representation, there is continuity in work of Polling Station Committees, i.e. there are experienced people but also new young personnel employed and all of them have at least secondary education. President and Deputy President have good organizational skills, experience and professional experience on elections is higher than minimum required for all members of the Polling Station Committee.

The important issue in assignment of duties within Polling Station Committee is that individual abilities of each member are taken into consideration, so for example young person who has good sight works on the list of voters, older and more experienced and respectful person supervise work of ballot boxes, and persons involved in administrative works, i.e. people who were trained to count work on classification and accounting of ballot papers etc.