The Constitutional Court last week began began its decision-making process on whether Croatian election constituencies, which haven't been changed since 1999, are in line with the Constitution, the state news platform Hina reported on Thursday, in their summary of an article published by Jutarnji List daily.

Jutarnji List reported that the head of the court, judge Miroslav Separovic, told them that the court ordered detailed data on the current number of voters in registration databases per each constituency, from the Ministry of Justice and Public Administration. According to Separovic, “the debate preceding a final decision on the fate of the law on constituencies will resume early in the New Year.”

For parliamentary elections Croatia uses a system of ten geographic constituencies which do not align with local government borders. Each party has to nominate a list of 14 candidates in each constituency, and then each party wins a number of seats proportional to the percentage of the vote its list received. Hence every constituency gives 14 MPs for a total of 140.

Additional MPs are elected in special constituencies for the so-called diaspora i.e. Croatian passport-holders living abroad, which gives three MPs, and another eight MPs are elected to represent various ethnic minorities by members of their communities, including the largest minority, Serbs, who get three MPs. This gives a total of 151 MPs.

According to the current law, the number of voters in each constituency must not deviate from the average constituency size by more than 5 percent. However, this created problems already by the time the 2007 election came around. In 2010 the Constitutional Court compiled a report warning Parliament about that problem.

In spite of the deviations which only continued to increase, so much so that in the most recent election in 2020 some even questioned the validity of the vote, and the fact that there were three censuses since, in 2001, in 2011, and in 2021, no government has done anything to fix the problem.

The current system, adopted by the then ruling nationalist party HDZ in 1999 prior to the January 2000 election, is widely believed to give the ruling HDZ party an unfair advantage by diluting the vote in urban areas and especially in the capital Zagreb, and by giving much higher voters-per-MP value to deputies from rural areas. This is particularly the case with the massively depopulated eastern region of Slavonia, traditionally a HDZ stronghold.

However, because of the rapid decline in population and mass emigration, especially since Croatia’s EU membership in 2013 – which especially hit rural areas – the difference in the size of voter roll between mostly rural and urban-rural constituencies has drastically increased.

The 2021 census showed that the disproportion between constituencies was even larger than previously thought, and compared to the poorly maintained electoral rolls for the 2021 local elections showed that Croatia has nearly half a million people of what Jutarnji List called “excess voters,” i.e. phantom voters who are thought to be dead or no longer live in their constituency.

According to data used for the latest July 2020 election Croatia has 3.67 million voters, out of a population which the 2021 census put at 3.88 million.

Meanwhile, the actual number of voters who turn out to vote has been constantly falling over the last seven elections held in the past 20 years, from 2.9 million in January 2000 to 1.7 million in July 2020, a 42-percent drop. Over the same period, the number of registered voters on the books dwindled much more slowly, as it went from 4.0 million in 2000 to 3.67 million in 2020 – a drop of merely 8 percent.