PDK demands the annulment of thousands of postal votes

2026-01-08 22:20:01, Kosova & Bota CNA

The Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) has officially requested the annulment of around 20,000 votes sent to the country by mail from exile for the early parliamentary elections on December 28, citing legal violations.

The PDK - which came second in the election - filed a complaint with the Electoral Complaints and Appeals Panel (ECAP) on Thursday.

She said that over 20,000 ballots were mailed from abroad late, after the legally permitted deadline.

Days earlier, the spokesman for the Central Election Commission (CEC), Valmir Elezi, told Radio Free Europe that the commission - which oversees the electoral process in the country - had received around 20,000 ballots sent by mail from the diaspora in early January.

"There are about 20,000 packages of ballots withdrawn on January 2 and 5 that are expected to be counted soon," Elezi said on January 5.

According to the Kosovo Law on Elections, ballots sent by mail from abroad can be accepted by the CEC no later than one day after the elections.

Article 96 states that "votes through voting outside Kosovo, sent by mail to the CEC mailbox in Kosovo, are accepted by the CEC until the day after election day at 4:00 p.m., provided that they are postmarked before election day."

PDK member of the CEC, Ilir Gashi, wrote on Facebook on Thursday that the proposal to accept ballots after the deadline was approved by the CEC "with the awareness that a legal violation was being committed, although this was justified with the aim of not being misunderstood that we are against the diaspora."

"Therefore, the competent bodies must decide on the merits regarding the CEC's decision to accept ballots outside the legal deadline," Gashi wrote.

But Alban Krasniqi - a member of the Vetevendosje Movement in the CEC, which won the elections convincingly, including postal votes - accused the PDK of a "shameful" complaint against the diaspora.

"They themselves voted on the procedure and deadlines in the CEC, and now that the diaspora has self-organized and managed to bring ballots from all over the globe, they have been burned by this fact, forgetting that their loss is not from the diaspora, nor from the voters in Kosovo, but from the harmful behavior, actions and decisions of the PDK itself," Krasniqi wrote on Facebook on Thursday.

Around 51,000 Kosovo citizens in exile were registered to vote by mail in these elections.

When about 80 percent of the postal votes were counted, Prime Minister Albin Kurti's Vetëvendosje won 30,671 votes, while PDK only 4,335 votes.

Before the start of the counting of postal votes, the PDK was on track to win 23 seats in the Kosovo Assembly, but now it has lost one seat.

Vetëvendosje, meanwhile, has won 57 seats and Kurti is expected to form the country's new government once the election results are verified.

The CEC announced late Thursday that it is nearing the end of the last postal vote count before announcing the final results and verifying them.

"The counting of the last batch of ballots, over 3,000, that were brought to Kosovo during the day has begun," the CEC said on Facebook./REL