CEC asks authorities to investigate after more than 2,200 new residents signed up in a month, when the normal rate is 80
TIRANA, May 7 – Election officials have asked law enforcement authorities to investigate an unusual increase in the number of people who became official residents of Durrës municipality ahead of the local administrative elections scheduled for June 21.
Official data show 2,200 people registered as new residents in Albania’s second largest municipality in the past six weeks. The normal rate for Durrës had been about 80 new residents per month.
The move by Albania’s Central Elections Commission comes after opposition Democratic Party officials accused the incumbent mayor, Vangjush Dako of the ruling Socialist-led coalition, of trying to get more leftist voters into the municipality to aid him in what is expected to be a tight race against Grida Duma of the Democrat-led coalition.
Armand Teliti, an opposition representative at CEC, had urged the CEC to do a verification of voter lists. Teliti said that in the late March and early April period there had been a surge of new resident voters in Durrës in a matter of three to four weeks.
The opposition representative added that the majority of new residents have signed up as living in areas where there are no homes to house them and 90 percent of all the home lease contracts needed for the official residency registration were carried out at a single notary public, when there are tens such offices to choose from in Durrës.
In Albania, voter registration is based on official residence registration, the changing of which is a cumbersome bureaucratic procedure. It is not unusual for Albanians who have lived in Tirana for years, for example, to still be registered in their hometowns elsewhere.
Because the vote is expected to be tight, in the port city of Durrës, passions have been running high. ast week, a brawl erupted at a Democratic Party campaign event when two young men carrying a flag of the Socialist Party showed up to protest.
