The Run-off Teaches Responsibility

Kosovo’s elections spotlight citizen agency, exposing weak local governance and lazy journalism, evidence matters, accountability bites, and scorekeeping misreads a democracy learning to demand.

The line held for a beat before Alfred Lela’s voice came through brisk, companionable, already moving. We were not setting the world to rights, we were trying to read a small country’s pulse. The prompt was local elections in Kosovo, but the conversation spilled beyond ward maps and turnout rates into the grammar of accountability, who counts the votes, who names the winners, who answers for the silence between announcement and fact.

The first question, why the Central Election Commission’s preliminary results had been delayed, should have been simple. It was not. The explanations offered to the public had come in headline form “technical issues,” “connectivity problems” with little in the way of documentary ballast. In a system a quarter-century old, that absence is not merely a procedural hiccup, it is an editorial one. Where institutions present vagueness, the press has a duty to insist on particulars, logs, incident reports, chain-of-custody notes, timestamps that survive scrutiny.…