BOSNIAN ELECTIONS RUN WELL DESPITE SHORTCOMINGS - PEC MEMBER

( Editorial: --> 0821 ) SARAJEVO, Sept 16 (Hina) - Last weekend's general elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina were held in a better atmosphere than previous years and it was very significant that a total of 80 per cent of registered voters took part. This was stated in Sarajevo on Wednesday by Mirko Boskovic, a member of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) Provisional Election Commission (PEC) and a judge in the Constitutional Court of the Federation of BH. Boskovic told Hina that the main deficiency of the elections was the incomplete electoral rolls because of which between 150,000 and 200,000 people had to vote using unconfirmed ballot papers, which significantly slowed down the counting process. "It mostly involves citizens who properly registered in 1997 and 1998," he said. Boskovic said that all unconfirmed papers had been placed into special envelopes and sent to the OSCE's central vote counting centre, where it could be checked whether these people indeed had a right to vote. In the meantime he believes that in this case, technical reasons were at fault and there was no reason to believe it was an attempt at manipulating voters. Boskovic also recalled that in previous years there were not incidents of polling stations not receiving electoral rolls on time, like had occurred this year. The PEC therefore had to pass a decision on opening additional polling stations on the second day of the September 12 and 13 elections. Boskovic said that this year's ballot papers had been considerably more complicated which was why there was a high informal vote. "According to some rough estimations, we believe that about 10 per cent of ballot papers are invalid, which is significantly higher than the normal average of two to three per cent," he said. Boskovic assessed that because of the problems which had emerged, the wait for the final election results would be longer than had been foreseen. (Hina) mbr jn /sp 161753 MET sep 98