Invitations to vote in elections were sent to voters until the mid 1990s, and ethnic minorities are now demanding their reintroduction because they believe that voters in smaller towns do not have enough information on their rights and obligations.
They have warned that a parliamentary conclusion from 2001 established that citizens must not be asked to state their ethnic background in official forms, so the Ministry of the Interior must no longer collect such information when registering a citizen's place of residence.
Minority deputies also warn that the Ministry of the Interior automatically registers new voters, but that it no longer registers their nationality, which means that the actual number of potential minority voters (who vote in the 12th constituency) is much higher than on voter lists. They therefore demand that invitations to vote should draw voters' attention to the fact that they can vote in the 12th constituency, if they are members of a minority community.
The club of ethnic minorities in the parliament also demands that voter lists be public documents, because candidates running in elections in the 12th constituency do not know how many people have stated their minority ethnic background and which body of voters they are addressing.
The objections of minority deputies to the government bill on voter lists have been accepted by the parliamentary Committee on Human and Minority Rights, whose chairman Furio Radin has said that minority MPs will make the adoption of the bill conditional on the adoption of their amendments.