There are almost half a million extra voters in the Croatian electoral register, with some counties and towns literally having more registered voters than residents, the Jutarnji List daily reported on Tuesday.

Croatia has had the problem of surplus voters in the electoral register for decades, failing to deal with it. After the 2021 census, that anomaly has culminated. For example, the town of Obrovac in the Zadar hinterland has 3,500 residents, but 5,500 voters, the daily said.

The votes of fictitious voters have an increasingly big impact on the election of political representatives, but they also cause another major problem, one which so far has not been discussed that much. It seriously affects the formula for the calculation of the value of each voter’s vote and contributes to the covert inequality of votes.

Unlike most European countries, Croatia determines the size of its constituencies (each elects 14 deputies who must be elected with roughly the same number of votes) in line with the situation in the electoral register, while in other countries, the number of seats per constituency is determined according to census results.

It became evident back in 2007 that there are serious discrepancies in the number of voters between individual constituencies, and the Constitutional Court in 2010 adopted a report warning the parliament about it and about the need to amend the Constituencies Act.

In the last parliamentary election, held in 2020, the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) got three more seats in the parliament owing to the unequal value of votes. When adding the fact that with a population of 3.8 million Croatia has half a million fictitious voters, it becomes evident that its parliament and government have been elected for a long time according to an unfair election model.

Judging by Constitutional Court President Miroslav Separovic’s statements, it is clear that the Constitutional Court will use its powers to try and compel the government to amend the Constituencies Act, however, experts warn that that is no longer sufficient.

By the end of the year, the Constitutional Court will discuss a draft decision on the topic of the (un)constitutionality of the Constituencies Act, prepared by Constitutional Court judge Goran Selanec.

Judge Selanec has reportedly proposed that the Constitutional Court should also state its position on how the electoral register affects the constitutionality of elections and on the fact that the borders of constituencies do not correspond with the administrative borders of counties.