After the decision of the State Electoral Commission to reject all complaints submitted by the parties, VMRO-DPMNE said that it demands a manual recount of the ballots and will take the request to the Administrative Court.

The decision by the State Electoral Commission to reject our request damages the electoral process and undermines the reputation of the Republic of Macedonia. That is why we will send our request to the Administrative Court, VMRO-DPMNE said in its press release.

The process would include physically examining the sealed materials from 3,480 polling stations and verifying the results reported by the individual election commissions. The conservative party said that the process was badly damaged with the chaotic vote counting and the unusual hacking attack which crashed the SEC website in the key hours after the elections.

The results that were published electronically do not match the realistic results in some stations and the SEC violated its legal obligation to publish the results within 12 hours. The numbers of used and unused ballots put together are lower than the number of total voters. This leaves a suspicion that some ballots are missing, the party said.

Another of the issues raised by the party is a review of the process of determining which ballots are considered invalid. There was a relatively high number of over 30,000 invalid ballots, which could indicate abuse on part of the electoral commissions and ruining the ballots after the vote. VMRO-DPMNE pointed to the organized campaign on the part of SDSM party activists to entice opposition supporters to make their ballots invalid by crossing out the word “North” from the imposed name “Republic of North Macedonia” or by adding “Never” before “North.