In an interview with Balkan Insight, Director of the Civilian Registrar Project Bledar Doracaj explains the necessity of a centralized database of address data, linked to the databases of the energy and water providers in the country.
Although the project to develop this database was announced by former Minister of Interior Affairs Saimir Tahiri in November 2015, and the draft law was only accepted by Parliament in September 2016.
The initial plan, however, was to have the registration process finished before the end of last year, in time to provide an accurate basis for the elections of June 2017 and allow Albanian diaspora to vote in the elections.
In an interview with newspaper Panorama from July 25, 2016, Doracaj claimed the following:
Up to the end of May, there are 4,415,000 citizens of the Republic of Albania. As regards the voters without address, I can say that 2010 the General Directorate of Civil Status has not received any decision of municipal or communal councils […], as such the register of addresses has not been updated since 2010. So by improving this collaboration [between state institutions] and making an address system by knocking from door to door at every apartment, we will make the number of voters with code 999, 888, or 000 go to zero. Currently we have 300,000 citizens with an unidentified address. Our objective is that on December 31, all citizens will have a functional address.
Needless to say, this deadline has not been met, as the door-to-door action has only started in January. It is also not as successful as Doracaj wants us to believe. Many of the declaration forms have been shoved underneath the door, with little or no explanation what they are for, and whether the personal information given to the government will be treated as privacy-sensitive information.
In his recent interview with Balkan Insight, Doracaj now claims that the deadline will be six months later, July 28, thus failing to meet what appeared to be one of the main goals of the new system: identifying 300,000 missing addresses and thus reducing the possibility of voter fraud. By moving the deadline to after the elections, this chance to improve the credibility of the elections, as well as the possibility for emigrants to vote during the elections, has been definitely lost.
Doracaj further claimed that
In cases where citizens do not to reply the registers’ call to declare their home and businesses address, the communal police is going to come and provide help.
It is unclear what the “help” of the communal police in these cases will be, as there is no legal framework in which the municipal police can demand any citizen to hand over their rental contract, water bill, or energy bill. This would be a severe infringement upon the privacy of the Albanian citizens.
