The Kosovo Central Election Commission, CEC, on Monday decided to recount votes cast at all polling stations in all 28 municipalities, after a recount in ten municipalities, which included 36 per cent of the 2,557 ballot boxes, showed manipulation of the votes cast for MP candidates in the first count.

Kreshnik Radoniqi, head of the CEC, explained that the recount in ten municipalities, decided on January 13, had revealed “possible errors in the registration of candidates’ votes and the addition of votes as a result of the re-evaluation of invalid ballots, and in certain polling stations, larger changes are evident for some candidates”.

He said the change in the number of votes cast for candidates after the recount in ten municipalities showed that the process had been inaccurate. However, little to no change was seen in the overall party results.

One of the more extreme cases, according to Radoniqi, was seen in Prizren. There, as the result of the recount, 29,343 votes were deducted for some candidates and 16,366 votes were added to other candidates. In total, “after the recount, 20,978 votes were added to the candidates, which were not correctly registered”, he said.

The CEC will submit the findings of the recount to the special prosecution for investigation.

Earlier on Monday, Democracy in Action, DiA, a local network of election observers, called for a large-scale investigation to identify individual responsibility and any potentially coordinated action.

“The investigation should extend beyond the technical level of the counting process. The repeated patterns of deviations in favour of certain candidates within and across certain municipalities create reasonable grounds for suspecting that these are not the products of human error or chance, but of deliberate actions by commissioners,” DiA said in a Facebook post. “The candidates who benefit from these discrepancies and manipulations should be part of the investigation, in order to clarify whether there was incitement, coordination or direct or indirect involvement in vote manipulation,” it added.

The vote recount resulted in drastic changes in some candidates’ lists, especially within the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, where certain candidates lost thousands of votes. One MP candidate, Fetah Pacarizi, had 6,022 votes deducted after the recount – the biggest difference so far. Another PDK candidate Uran Ismaili, a former candidate for the mayoralty of the capital, Pristina, gained 763 votes more than in the preliminary results.

In the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK, the majority of changes were seen in Prizren, where one of the candidates, Xhavit Uka, had 1,597 votes less votes after the recount, while Paris Guri had 181 more.

Considerable changes were also seen in the party that won the December 28 elections, the Vetevendosje Movement. MP candidate Arber Rexhaj lost 631 votes, whereas former parliament speaker Glauk Konjufca had 161 votes added votes after the recount.

Two opposition leaders have called for total vote recounts after the changes: the head of the LDK, Lumir Abdixhiku, and the head of the Alliance for Future of Kosovo, AAK, Ramush Haradinaj.

Preliminary results from the early parliamentary elections showed the ruling Vetevendosje, LVV, led by incumbent Prime Minister Albin Kurti, well in the lead with 51.1 per cent of the votes, which means he can likely form a government without coalition agreements and so end a ten-month-long institutional deadlock. Vetevendosje will have 57 MPs in the 120-seat chamber.

The PDK, led by Bedri Hamza, followed with 20.2 per cent. The LDK won 13.2 per cent of the votes and the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK, 5.5 per cent.

Local and international organisations have otherwise welcomed the smooth conduct of the election process by the CEC, despite the short time for preparations it had.