The Central Election Commission of Kosovo has completed the preliminary check of diaspora votes and rejected 20,400 envelopes containing an undisclosed number of ballots. This amounts to over 27 percent of all ballot envelopes received by post; the remaining 53,600 were accepted as regular.
The preliminary check of ballots received from abroad was finalized on Saturday. The CEC has not made public the number of ballots received, but only that of envelopes. Each envelope can contain more than one ballot, usually from the same family.
CEC spokesman Valmir Elezi said in a press conference on Saturday that they will start counting these ballots after they finish counting the 31,500 conditional ballots and 2,800 ballots of persons with special needs.
He had clarified earlier during the process that the rejected ballots included persons who had not registered to vote, those who sent in invalid identification documents, those who sent ballots twice, and other irregularities.
It is meanwhile expected that the recounting of ballots in nearly 20 percent of polling stations is finalized on Saturday.
Unofficial results of the February 14 elections in Kosovo put Vetëvendosje first with 47.85 percent of the vote, followed by the Democratic Party of Kosovo with 17.41 percent, the Democratic League of Kosovo with 13.08 percent, and the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo with 7.43 percent.
