Original article (in Serbian) was published on 17/01/2022
The results from the referendum in Lajkovac shows how an incorrectly written number can become serious fake news that could blow up on social networks. Ivan Mandic, a member of the presidency of the Party of Freedom and Justice, wrote on Twitter that about 3,800 people voted in this municipality yesterday and that another 2,700 people went to the polls in the last hour of the referendum, implying that it was an orchestrated voting. However, Mandic came to this conclusion based on inaccurate data on the turnout from the website Lajkovac na dlanu, which the journalist of this website confirmed to Raskrikavanje.
According to the data from the website Lajkovac na dlanu, out of 11,661 registered voters in the Municipality of Lajkovac, one-third went to the polls by 7 pm. This data was published around 7:30 pm, and it was titled “By 4 pm, 32.4 percent turnout in Lajkovac”.
A few hours later, the same website published a new text with preliminary results after the polls closed.
However, it contained the astonishing fact that by the end of the referendum in Lajkovac, 55.7 percent of voters had voted. In other words, about 3,800 people from Lajkovac voted by 7 pm. In the last hour, around 2,700 people voted before poll closing time.
This disinformation reached Twitter when Ivan Mandic from the SSP published a tweet around 11 pm. So far, it gathered more than 1,000 retweets.
The reason why this happened is an incorrectly written number in the text of the local website – instead of 35.7 percent of those who went to the polls in Lajkovac, the journalist of the Lajkovac na dlanu, Snezana Bilic, wrote 55.7 percent.
Last night, as Bilic was waiting for the results from the Municipal Election Commission, she manually collected data from the polling stations she came across. Towards the end of the count, she talked with her source who gave her a preliminary figure.
“Either he wrongly told me that the turnout was 55.7 percent, or he told me 35.7 percent, and I didn’t write it down correctly. That number stayed on the website for about half an hour, then they called me and told me that I was wrong, so the text was changed and we apologized on Facebook”, said Bilic.
Bilic claims that she did not write such a thing on purpose because she had no reason for it. It was an unintentional mistake she made in a hurry and the mistake was soon corrected.
According to the data taken from the records which arrived at the Republic Election Commission from 35 polling stations in Lajkovac, 4,168 voters (about 35.7 percent) took part in the referendum in this municipality. While 2,322 people voted “yes”, 1,763 voted “no”.