Head of the State Electoral Commission Aleksandar Dastevski said that the SEC is looking into ways to allow citizens with expired identity cards to vote. Macedonia is experiencing a major shortage of this key document as the Interior Ministry stopped issuing them.

We will do what we can to get to a legal option. Citizens already can use their passports as replacement for the identity cards, Dastevski said.

The municipal elections are due on October 17th. The Zaev Government is trying to accommodate its Albanian partner BESA and to redesign the identity cards so that the ethnic identity of the carrier is included in them. The law is stuck in Parliament but the Interior Ministry stopped issued the original cards, causing a growing backlog as the number of citizens without documents grows by the day.