Public Administration Minister Lovro Kusčević said on Wednesday, while commenting on invalid signatures for petitions for the two referendum initiatives, that those irregularities included names that had been crossed out, duplicate signatures, non-existing or invalid Personal Identification Numbers, signatures by under-age persons and signatures of deceased people as well as of non-Croatian citizens.
During the verification of the signatures, a high number of identical lists of signatures for both initiatives has been established, Kusčević said.
The People Decide civil initiative as well as The Truth about the Istanbul Convention civil initiative conducted their respective signature-collection campaigns on May 13-27. The former initiative initiated the collection of signatures for changing the election legislation and for ethnic minority parliamentary deputies to be denied the right of taking part in a no-confidence vote against governments and of having a say in budget adoption. The latter initiative advocates the idea that Croatia should abrogate the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.
Earlier in the day, Kusčević presented the government with a 47-page report on how the verification of 1.2 million signatures for the two referendum petitions had been collected.
Commenting on the the statistics on invalid signatures, Kusčević said that this was in line with the experience from the previous cases of collection of referenda signatures, when the invalid signatures range between 9% and 11%.
The People Decide civil initiative that wanted a referendum on two questions collected 412,325 signatures for the petition for a referendum on electoral changes, and 371,450 were valid whereas 40,875 were invalid. They collected 407,835 signatures for a referendum question that would propose stripping national minority representatives of the right to decide on government formation and the state budget, and 367,169 were valid and 40,666 were invalid.
The Truth about the Istanbul Convention civil initiative submitted 390,916 signatures for their referendum petition and 345,942 were valid and 44,974 invalid.
The full report on the signatures verification will be published on the ministry's web site soon.