The Democracy Plus NGO (D+), supported by the International Republican Institute, IRI, have launched a new mapping platform for elections in Kosovo.

The platform gathers data regarding electoral turnout in municipal and central elections, as well as the number of votes for political parties and the percentage of valid votes, facilitating public access to statistical analysis of elections and allowing comparisons. It also enables analysis of information at the level of municipalities right down to individual polling stations.

Participating in the launch of this platform was the head of the Central Election Commision, CEC, Valdete Daka, who praised the cooperation between the Commission, IRI and D+.

“The CEC has paid great attention to civil society and in this regard we have tried to respond to your requests for this platform,” she said. “The CEC cooperated well with all actors during electoral processes, especially civil society.”

She stressed that the platform will allow the public to access and uncover information easier. “In the future, we are open to providing all the information we are entitled to reveal at any time,” Daka added. “We are open to everyone.”

Albert Krasniqi, program director at D + stated that a key benefit of the new platform is that data will be presented visually, which can provide benefits for many actors.

“The platform is also good for the political parties themselves to understand what happened in previous elections and how to improve their performance,” Krasniqi said. “It will also help the media make more comparisons and analyses, and benefit researchers looking into elections.”

Behar Xharra, who was involved in implementing the platform, said that the project is essential, as in the past data on elections were only published in a PDF format and were difficult to access.

“In the past we had a lot of data on elections in PDF, and it was not very easy to filter, analyze and transform to see the data at the municipal level, or make other comparisons,” Xharra said. “What we have done as a company, with the support of IRI and D +, is transform the data into a common structure and enable anyone interested to analyze the data for different municipalities, different centers and even different polling stations.”