Bosnia opens the polls for 3.4 million voters, with fingerprint checks for the first time

Polling stations in Bosnia and Herzegovina open at 7 a.m. local time on Sunday and close at 7 p.m., for the country's tenth general election since the Dayton agreement ended the war in 1995. The Central Election Commission lists 3,408,517 people on the voter register as of midnight on 20 August 2026. They will choose 518 office-holders from 7,028 certified candidates. For the first time at a general election, identification is biometric and ballots go through scanners, with a faster transmission of results.

Election silence began at 7 a.m. on Saturday and runs until the stations close. During those hours, campaign activity is barred, and so is reporting that amounts to campaigning. A voter needs a Bosnian identity card, a driving licence or a passport. Inside the country the commission has set up 5,569 polling stations, 5,121 of them regular, with 385 mobile teams working alongside them. Some stations have been merged.

The register includes 48,078 voters outside the country. Of those, 45,457 vote by post and 2,621 vote at diplomatic and consular missions. Voting abroad is organised at 20 missions in 13 countries. The August cutoff matters. Anyone who registered after midnight on 20 August is not on this list, which is the list the scanners will check.

The ballot is stacked because the constitution is stacked. Voters elect the three members of the state presidency, one Bosniak and one Croat from the Federation and one Serb from Republika Srpska, and 42 members of the state House of Representatives. In the Federation they elect 98 seats in the entity legislature and the assemblies of ten cantons. In Republika Srpska they elect the entity president and vice presidents and 83 seats in the National Assembly. The same voter does not face every race. The paper depends on the entity, and in the Federation on the canton.

The presidency is the race with the widest effect. The three members nominate the chair of the Council of Ministers and set the tone of foreign policy, including the long argument over EU accession and over whether Republika Srpska can keep acting as a near-separate state. Dayton still writes the ethnic key into those offices. Sunday's vote does not amend that key. It fills it.

The machines are the operational change. Biometric identification and ballot scanners were introduced with EU support, first in a limited form in 2024, to cut illegal voting, speed the count and give a clearer picture of turnout. Analysts at the Atlantic Council have noted that the register is widely thought to be inflated, and that a scan tied to a fingerprint should make the gap between registered names and people who actually vote easier to see than in 2022. A cleaner turnout figure will also be read, inside and outside the country, as a measure of how far the population has fallen since the war.

Results will not be a single number on Sunday night. State, entity and cantonal counts move on different clocks, and postal votes from 13 countries arrive later than the in-person tally. The commission's promise is that the scanner feed will be quicker than the hand count of previous cycles. The test is whether the feed holds in places where previous counts were disputed. A machine does not settle a challenge about who was allowed to stand, or about a seat reserved by ethnicity. It settles, if it works, the narrower question of whether the person at the table is the person on the list, and whether the mark on the paper is the mark that gets added up.

By Sunday evening the silence ends and the first scanner totals should start to move. The number to watch first is not a party score. It is how many of the 3,408,517 registered names produce a vote that the new system accepts.