"Civil Society Monitoring the Elections in Albania - Keeping it Free and Fair"

Albanian Institute of Science is a non-governmental organization established in line with the existing legislation in the Republic of Albania. 

AIS has a strong team of activist and professionals, with expertise in economy, statistics, computer science, communication and journalism

Electoral Spending is a crucial module for the Open Data Albania portal, publishing data on

the declared expenditures in three electoral campaigns.

These data include amounts of money, sources of income, names of donors, electoral debts and expenditure structure.

Transparency and auditing of electoral campaign expenditures is a novelty in a former communist country of Albania.

It was only in 2008 that political parties were obliged by law to declare the source of the funds obtained for their electoral campaigns.

Meanwhile, there is still no legal control mechanism in case of conflict of interest related to the assets of politicians. Such control and reporting is done only by the media.

We conducted a research regarding expenditures in election campaigns held in the years 2009 - 2013, placing the values declared in a comparative position

The research is based on official data from the audit reports of the accounting experts.

The most expensive campaign is the campaign for the Assembly elections held in 2013.

The second most costly campaign is the one of 2009 for local government elections, and the less costly compared to these three campaigns, is the one of the year 2011. 

A very important category of elective subject’s funds are donations.

Donations are non public funds donated for elective subjects. Donations comprise sums of money or goods and services given not against any payment.

Regarding donations, the 2013 Election Campaign has seen donations of higher values

So we explored the Private Donations of the Election Campaign 2013

The research is based on official data of the audit reports from the political parties auditors.

The conditions for donations in favor of political parties, has been defined in Section 89 of the Electoral Code by the legislature

In the last election campaign, 50 % of financial resources are private donations.

From sixty- six parties that participated in the elections, twenty -five of them declared donations to a total of 121,130,076 ALL (approximately $ 1,187,549). 

The Democratic Party has secured 52.29 % of the total private giving of the campaign

followed by the Socialist Party which , although party winning the election process has provided donations in the ratio of only 37.4 % of the total electoral donations. 

'Fryma e re demokratike' party and the 'partia per drejtesi, integrim dhe unitet' are the parties that secured respectively the 3 and 2 % of the total donations being ranked even better than 'Lëvizja Socialiste për Integrim‘

LSI in this campaign has officially declared support with private donations at a low level that constitutes only 1 % of total campaign donations.

List of Donors, Democartic Party - 2013 Electoral Campaign

List of Donors, LSI Party - 2013 Electoral Campaign

List of Donors, Socialist Party - 2013 Electoral Campaign

Free and fair elections are a fundamental element of democracy.

Every citizen has the right to participate in the electoral process and thereby special attention has to be given to all voters.

However, Albania experienced cases where citizens were unable to vote because of administrative defects like lack of names in the voter’s list, problems finding proper voting centers etc. during the electoral process

Although the Government of Albania and international institutions are supporting the process by taking the necessary measures to have a successful reform implementation, Za´Lart can help improve this process through reporting and addressing possible problems and concerns in real-time

Za´Lart Project Objectives:

Working as an online monitoring platform (Web & Applications) from citizens;

Real-time receiving and addressing alerts/information on election problems;

Raising citizens´ voice and increasing civic role in electoral process through real-time monitoring;

Real-time monitoring that increases objective and professional response;

Using ICT to make elections account in the country;

Increasing public pressure on responsible institutions for a regular and fair electoral process.