Voting for Croatia's seventh parliament began on Saturday morning at some of the polling stations outside the country where Croatian nationals with no permanent residence in Croatia can vote for their three representatives in the Sabor.
Voting in Constituency No. 11, which is also referred to as the Diaspora electoral unit, started at 0700 hrs Saturday due to time zone differences. The polling stations for this constituency will be opened from 0700 hrs to 1900 hrs on Saturday and Sunday.
Voters in Auckland, New Zealand, eligible to cast ballots in Croatian elections, will be the first to go to the polls, and the out-of-country voting will end on 4 December with the closure of polling stations in Los Angeles, USA.
A total of 124 polling stations have been set up in 52 countries for this purpose.
Most of the polling stations, 30, have been organised in Bosnia and Herzegovina, followed by Germany (19), Australia and Serbia (six each), and the United States with four polling stations.
A total of 411,758 voters can vote on candidates from 15 slates, which have applied for election in this constituency.
Apart from Croatian voters with no permanent residence in Croatia, voters with permanent residence in Croatia, who happen to be outside the country on the election day, can also cast their ballots at polling stations abroad for candidates in their constituencies.
In the previous parliamentary election four years ago, 404,950 people were eligible to vote in Constituency No. 11. Of them, 90,402 went to the polls, and the turnout was 22.32 percent. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) mustered 81.92 percent of the vote and secured five seats in parliament reserved for that electoral district. The number of seats for that constituency depended on the turnout.
In 2010, the Constitution's amendments introduced the fixed number of three seats for the Diaspora and proposed that polling stations be set up only in cities where Croatia has its embassies or consular offices.
