Prosecutors in Tetovo rejected the proposed charges filed by the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party over the apparent and obvious irregularities during the failed September 2018 referendum.

Barely 37 percent of the population voted in the referendum in which Macedonians were asked if they support the name change into “North Macedonia” as well as EU and NATO membership. This rejection came after months of high level visits by the likes of Angela Merkel and James Mattis, but the name change was rammed through Parliament using bribery and blackmail anyway.

And even the 37 percent figure was achieved with overt ballot stuffing in Albanian majority districts in Tetovo and elsewhere, which had low turnout until 17h, but had a huge “spike in voters” in the final two hours of voting. In some polling places, if the votes cast in the final two hours were legitimate, it was calculated that voters went through the station every three or four seconds on average. More realistically, it was likely a repeat of the old practice of stuffing the unused ballot by party activists while the electoral commission looks the other way.

VMRO-DPMNE submitted the cases of unrealistically high late turnout to the prosecutors, and demanded that they interrogate the members of the local electoral commissions, the police officers deployed during the voting and other witnesses such as observers from the MOST group to determine what actually happened. But today the prosecutors informed the public that they will not act on the report.