Macedonia's election commission may allow re-run in one polling station

The State Electoral Commission (SEC) in Macedonia has accepted a complaint by the BESA party for a polling station in Gostivar where a woman was not allowed to vote because she was wrongly registered as already voted, sources with the commission said on Sunday.

This may lead to the holding of a re-voting in the polling station with around 800 voters, according to media reports.

The decision by the SEC has spurred strong reactions from the ruling party VMRO-DPMNE, which won the elections narrowly with 51 seats in parliament against 49 seats garnered by SDSM.

Political experts here said a re-voting could change the election result as the margin of VMRO­-DPMNE's victory is so slim.

VMRO-­DPMNE party leader Nikola Gruevski spoke to his supporters on Saturday evening that VMRO-­DPMNE would not participate in this repeated voting and would not accept its outcome.

He also urged foreign powers to stop intervene in Macedonia's internal affairs.

"We have information that foreign representatives were involved in the work of the SEC, with a goal to influence members to conduct post-election engineering and falsifying of the will of the citizens," Gruevski said.

According to the SEC, parties can submit appeals to the Administrative Court, which will have 48 hours to decide whether to accept them or not.

The commission has turned down 15 out of 16 complaints filed by the main opposition party SDSM and the party of BESA. Endit