Public Administration Minister Lovro Kuscevic said on Wednesday, that the irregularities found in the two failed referendum petitions included names that had been crossed out, duplicate signatures, non-existing or invalid Personal Identification Numbers, signatures by under-age persons, deceased people, as well as non-Croatian citizens.

During the government’s verification of petition signatures, a identical lists of signatures for both initiatives have been identified, Kuscevic said.

The two groups which called referendums on changes to Croatia’s election law and the revoking of the Istanbul Convention held their signature-collecting campaigns on May 13-27.

Earlier on Wednesday, Kuscevic presented a 47-page report in a cabinet meeting on the verification of 1.2 million signatures collected for the two petitions.

Kuscevic said that the number of signatures that had been declared invalid – and which made the petitions fail – was in line with previous referendum petitions, when the proportion of invalid signatures was at 9-11 percent.

The People Decide initiative which wanted a referendum on two questions related to election law handed over more than 400,000 signatures for each question, with the government declaring over 40,000 invalid in each, making the petition fall short of the legally required 374,000 signatures.

The initiative called Truth about the Istanbul Convention submitted nearly 391,000 signatures, with almost 45,000 declared invalid.

Kuscevic said that the full report on the verification of signatures would be published soon on the ministry’s website.

“Report on petition signatures is a set-up,” says group organising petition

Meanwhile, a member of the group which petitioned against the Istanbul Convention, said on Wednesday that the government’s report was “a set up,” saying that it wasn’t possible that as many as 45,000 signatures they collected are invalid.

“It has been confirmed that this is a set-up and manipulation of the number of signatures,” Kristina Pavlovic, the group’s coordinator, said in a news conference.

“It simply isn’t possible that of the 390,000 signatures we collected, as many as 45,000 were invalid. That would mean that every ninth signature was invalid. That’s absolutely unrealistic, impossible and isn’t true… Citizens won’t forget nor forgive because these results are being fixed,” Pavlovic added.

The group said that they had counted a total of 390,000 signatures, and had themselves identified some 13,000 invalid signatures, which gives a final count of almost 378,000.

“We made a special effort to remove invalid signatures. However, it is simply impossible to get to a number of 45,000 from the 13,000 we estimated to be invalid, and it’s obvious that this is being done deliberately,” Pavlovic said.

HNS party files criminal report against groups behind petitions

Also on Wednesday, the liberal Croatian People’s Party (HNS, which is part of the ruling coalition led by the centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), said they filed a criminal report against both groups, for tampering with petitions, including collecting personal identification numbers of deceased persons and foreign nationals, as well as alleged copying of lists with signatures from a past 2013 referendum for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

“The same bunch from the two initiatives are trying to restrict women’s and ethnic minorities’ rights through signature forging and manipulation. People in Croatia get their property seized over debts as small as 500 kuna (€67) or 1,000 kuna (€135), and those groups have used lies and forgery to take dozens of millions of kuna from this country, its citizens and budget. That is what motivated us to file this report,” HNS leader Ivan Vrdoljak said in reaction to news that around 10 percent of the signatures were invalid.

Vrdoljak added that HNS respected the right to assembly, to protest and referendum of any citizen, including even “these initiatives that have been contaminating the public sphere with retrograde campaigns that are incompatible with the 21st century or the developed Western democracies which we aspire to join, as long as laws are complied with.”

“After the commission (in charge of checking signature authenticity) has found a number of irregularities, it is high time that the organisers of these initiatives are unmasked as manipulators with a very dangerous agenda, and any responsible politician who does not incite the worst of human emotions and knows what this is about, has the duty to condemn such manipulation,” said HNS, a junior partner in the coalition government led by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

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