The Central Election Commission (SIP) has verified the participation of 128 political subjects in the elections, meaning that 53 political parties, 36 party coalitions and 46 independent candidates meet the requirements for running for office.
The slates will contain the names of 7,497 persons who wish to be in office. They will run for office in the BiH Presidency, the BiH Parliament's House of Representatives, the Federation entity parliament's House of Representatives, the Serb entity's Assembly, the assemblies of the Federation's ten cantons, and for the Serb entity's president and two vice presidents.
A little over 3.3 million citizens can vote, which is a point of contention as the 2013 census put BiH's population at about 3.5 million, which would mean there are only 200,000 minors in the country.
SIP says that is actually not a problem as the central electoral roll is based on existing birth registers, including citizens living abroad.
Voter registration in BiH is passive, meaning that the name of every person with an ID is entered into voter lists. Thousands are actually in the diaspora, having BiH documents but permanently residing abroad.
The number of voters has been rising in every election, with about 2.5 million eligible to vote in the 2000 elections, whereas now there are almost a million more. On the other hand, turnouts have been decreasing since the end of the war in 1995. In the 1996 general elections, the turnout was 83%, whereas in the 2016 polls the turnout was about 55%.