The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia said last night that a post by students in blockades on social media, in which they present citizens with “instructions” on voting abroad, constitutes a malicious activity aimed at exerting day-to-day political pressure during the election campaign, and stated that October 3 is not the deadline for issuing decisions on voting abroad.
The Ministry, “in order to prevent the spread of disinformation”, provided clarifications regarding applications for voting abroad and stressed that the system works as follows: Serbian citizens who are temporarily residing abroad must, in order to exercise their right to vote, have a properly registered permanent residence address in Serbia and be entered in the Unified Voter Register, and must submit, through the nearest diplomatic or consular mission, a request to have an entry added to the voter register stating that they will vote abroad. The embassy or consulate then forwards the relevant request electronically through the information system to the competent municipal or city administration authorized to decide on applications for voting abroad.
The deadline for submitting applications to vote abroad is midnight on October 3, 2026, Belgrade time, but this does not mean that the same deadline applies to the issuing of decisions. This primarily depends on when the applications are submitted, as the competent authorities need a certain amount of time to process them and issue the relevant decisions. “It is also important to point out that the decision on changing the polling location is issued by the municipal or city administration after the Republic Electoral Commission adopts a decision on opening polling stations abroad,” the statement said.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed that Serbia’s diplomatic and consular network is working at full capacity every day on this task in order to process all applications received, as demonstrated by the fact that twice as many decisions have been issued compared with the previous election cycle, meaning there is absolutely no basis for spreading false claims of alleged obstruction. “Those who would like to put the entire nation on ‘ignore’ could learn one of the oldest principles on which the legal system is based: ignorantia iuris nocet – ignorance of the law is harmful. Being loud does not mean you are right. In fact, quite the opposite is usually true,” the statement said.
In social media posts in which they called on citizens abroad to register to vote, the students in blockades said yesterday that all applications to register to vote from the diaspora received by the end of the deadline on October 3 must also have been processed by then. In an accompanying post, the Students in Blockades also addressed an open letter to Serbia’s diplomatic and consular network, claiming that diplomatic and consular missions were obstructing the registration of voters in the diaspora and demanding that Serbian missions by October 3 “confirm that every registration application has been processed and forwarded to the competent municipality”, as well as that the missions “correct any inaccurate information provided to voters, including contradictory instructions regarding the place of voting”.
Source: NIN, 02.10.2026