The basic assumption of modern democracies is that every vote counts equally. Due to the equality of voting rights, for elections to be fair and citizens to have confidence in the electoral process, it is necessary to have a credible Voter Register, but also to urgently harmonize electoral legislation, agreed the participants in today's discussion on data and elections organized by Gong as part of the two-day Open Data Days conference.
Gong’s director, Oriana Ivković Novokmet, said that a credible Voter Registry is in the interest of all citizens, but that there is no political will on the part of the ruling party to "fix" it.
"In Gong, we compared the number of adult residents with the number of voters per unit. From this table, we see that the number of voters in all units is overstated. If the deviation in the most regulated constituency, the third one, is as much as eight percent, and as much as 20 percent in, say, the fifth constituency, then it is clear how big the disparity is," explained Ivković Novokmet.
"By introducing the Population Registry, we will have reliable information about where an individual lives and works. Taxes and surtaxes encourage residents to misreport their place of residence; there is a motive for someone to register in another, neighboring city, such as Samobor, rather than Zagreb," said Marko Krištof, an expert from FINA.
Dalija Orešković, a member of the Croatian Parliament's Committee on the Judiciary, stressed that the reform of the electoral system should be an integral part of the fight against corruption.
"A good part of the opposition parties support the Gong model of electoral units, we agree that we have six electoral units. We need a system designed from scratch, that should be our first and most important election promise," said Orešković, adding that she supports joint electoral legislation.
"The ruling party does not dare to regulate the Voter Register, there is no political courage to regulate electoral units according to the Gong model, there is no political courage to create a broader expert working group that will approach the conceptualization of the electoral code, because this is currently creating confusion with different rules for different elections," emphasized Sandra Benčić, a member of the Croatian Parliament's Committee on the Constitution, who added that it is very problematic that we do not even know the actual turnout in the elections, since as a country we have no idea how many voters there really are.
Professor of political science at the Faculty of Political Science and external member of the Parliamentary Committee for the Constitution and Political System, Goran Čular, emphasized that one of the basic functions of the state is counting, that is, keeping accurate and timely statistics.
“Statistics originally meant official data that the state counts. We are very weak in this regard. Austria-Hungary knew how many sheep there were in Bosnia, and today we do not know how many voters there are in Croatia,” he said. Čular also supported improving electoral legislation, organizing the voter register, and amending the Law on Electoral Units.
Slaven Hojski, a member of the State Electoral Commission (DIP), said that the regulation of electoral legislation for 2026 had been announced, which was an opportunity to improve and harmonize certain legislation. As local elections are now coming up, he added that citizens are confused by the fact that they have to vote exclusively in their place of residence.
The first panel was followed by a workshop, “How to expose bots: Gong’s experience from a super election year.”
Croatian elections in 2024 will be remembered for the exposed cases of coordinated use of fake accounts, which strengthened the digital visibility of political candidates and encouraged a distorted perception of the mass of voter support. Although we presented the participants of the conference with the steps for spotting them, it is important to emphasize that fake accounts are becoming more and more subtle and sophisticated, which makes their detection challenging.
"This is precisely why we need regulations such as the Act on Digital Services, which impose stricter responsibilities and obligations regarding content for social networks, but also educate citizens on how to hack algorithms and recognize dangers online," said Gong's digital tools expert, Matej Mikašinović Komšo.
Sergej Županić from Gong presented a new digital tool, Parlemetar Zagreb, through which citizens will be able to monitor the work of representatives of the City Assembly of the City of Zagreb. This is a project by Gong in cooperation with the organization Danes je nov dan (Today is the New Day), in which the experiences from the development and use of the digital platform for monitoring the work of the Croatian Parliament, Parlemetar.hr, are applied for the first time to the representative body of a local government unit.
The goal of the project is to enable citizens to easily review the agenda items, how the votes were cast, as well as how active each representative is, who said what, and what questions they asked, in one place. The platform with the entire current convocation of the City Assembly will be available to the public on the eve of the local elections, and immediately after the elections, data for the next convocation will be entered.
"Using this platform increases the possibility of using open data, influences greater transparency of the representative body, and due to easier access to open data, the public will better understand the work of the City Assembly. By better understanding the processes, citizens are more willing to participate in decision-making processes. A more informed public, in turn, means better citizen oversight of the representative body," he concluded.
Then, Dražen Lučanin, Head of the Information System and Technical Affairs Service of the City of Zagreb, presented current events on the opening of data and transparency of the finances of the City of Zagreb. Among the more important IT projects of the City of Zagreb, he singled out the ZET mobile application through which citizens can buy transport tickets with their mobile phones, eStipendija for applying for City of Zagreb scholarships online, and the Razvrstaj MojZG application, upgraded for easier waste disposal.
He presented the anti-corruption platform Zviždač for filing reports on irregularities in the operations of the city administration and commercial companies, the open data portal (https://data.zagreb.hr/), where the budget is available in a machine-readable format, and eparticipativno.zagreb.hr for directly proposing and voting on projects that will be financed from the budget of the City of Zagreb by city district.
In the presentation "Ahead of the local elections in 2025." Petra Rodik from Dotplot presented a database with search engines for a detailed overview of the results of the upcoming local elections, for which this digital tool will be ready. She explained that it will be possible to view the results on interactive maps, by parties, lists, candidates, and by spatial criteria (counties, cities, and municipalities), with the possibility of comparison with the results of the 2017 and 2021 election cycles.
At the end of the first day of the conference, Marko Tošić from Elentir explained how the Election Simulator, a digital tool for simulating electoral processes depending on constituencies, calculation methods, and electoral thresholds, would work.
He said that his motivation for creating the Election Simulator was the current constituencies for parliamentary elections in Croatia, which, due to the mismatch between the number of voters and residents and because they do not consistently follow regional specificities, have led to unequal vote weighting, artificially low voter turnout, and ultimately to public distrust in the electoral system.
Open Data Days continued the next day, with a rich program that you can find HERE.
