The State Election Commissioner, Mr. Ilirjan Celibashi talked to the media representatives regarding the progress of the registration process of voters from abroad in the Electronic Registration Platform (PER).

The updated data on PER system below:

• 38.231 voters (unique) who have submitted a request for registration (1 or more times);
• 9.104 voters (unique) whose requests have been rejected;
• 1.873 number of re-applications  ( unique number of voters who have been rejected and have re-applied );
• 636 unique number of voters who have re-applied and whose requests were approved
• 41.340 total number of received requests .

Rejections according to municipality

• Tiranë 1.160
• Fier 753
• Durrës 500
• Berat 470

Rejections according to the state

• Italy 3.887
• Greece 2.357
• Germany 1.276
• USA 356
• UK 251

After reporting the detailed information on applications who want to register as voters from abroad, on the countries of applications and the municipalities where the voters reside, he mentioned the errors the applicants make in uploading the documents that prove their residence address.

Commissioner Celibashi brought to attention the cases of the application of Albanian citizens from Italy, who have the highest number of incorrect uploading of document, the Italian driver’s license (front page of the license ) in PER. He underlined that Albanian citizens living in Italy should upload the back of the Italian license to the platform, as the back page contains the address of their residence.

Celibashi stated that the CEC will submit to the Albanian Parliament proposals for some technical changes to the Electoral Code, which relate to the cost of returning mail from the voter abroad to the CEC, which will be covered by the Albanian State, the review of registration deadline of coalitions and candidates, and the change of structure that will be responsible for the evaluation and counting of the ballot papers from abroad.

He also reported that the number of citizens (eligible to vote) whose ID card expires during April 15 April –  May 15, 2025, is 435,690 citizens, the number of citizens whose passport expires is 600,248 citizens and the number of citizens, whose electronic ID and biometric passport expires, is 209,931 citizens.

In the meantime, 160,213 citizens have never applied for electronic ID or biometric passports.

Commissioner Celibashi stated that considering the above figures and the discussions with more representatives of civil society and representatives of political parties, it is more than justifiable for the CEC to request to the Council of Ministers, to extend through a normative act the validity of identification documents.

Responding to the reporters’ interests regarding the application of electronic voting and counting, the Commissioner stated that it will be implemented as a pilot project as the political parties did not reach an agreement to extend it to the whole region of Tirana