# CRTA The **Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability** (CRTA, from its Serbian initials) is a Belgrade civil-society group. It became Serbia's main independent election monitor and the source of most of the hard numbers on how [[Aleksandar Vučić]]'s government tilted the electoral field. It runs a nationwide network of volunteer election observers, the fact-checking site **Istinomer** ("truth-meter"), and an Open Parliament project that tracks the National Assembly. Its founder and director is **Vukosava Crnjanski**; Raša Nedeljkov is its programme director. Its founding date is given differently: 2002 in one of its own biographies of its founder, and around 2010, when it grew out of an earlier group, in another account. ## What it found - **December 2023 elections.** CRTA reported organised **voter migration**: voters brought into Belgrade from elsewhere in Serbia and from abroad to vote in the capital's local election. It found signs of organised transport, supervised voting or ID irregularities at 14% of Belgrade polling stations, and concluded that Belgrade's result did "not reflect the freely expressed will of voters living there." The [[OSCE]]'s election office (ODIHR) found "unjust conditions" and misuse of public resources and urged an audit of the voter register. Its final report cited CRTA's evidence on migration without confirming it. - **Media.** Its airtime monitoring showed government figures taking roughly three-quarters of political coverage on national TV. In August 2026 it counted 49 live TV appearances by Vučić on 25 channels in 11 days, outside any campaign (one source). Those numbers anchor the media record on [[Serbia]] and [[Media Capture]]. - **25 October 2026.** Its observers at a sample of 500 polling stations reported pressure on voters or polling-station officials at about a third of them, and voters photographing their ballots, a common sign of vote-buying or coercion, at about half nationally and 80% in Belgrade by evening (one source). ## The campaign against it | Date | What happened | |---|---| | **Dec 2023 – Jan 2024** | After the voter-migration report, [[Ana Brnabić]] accuses CRTA of trying to "destabilize Serbia." Vučić calls its staff "foreign mercenaries," and ruling-party figures call for arrests and a ban (one source) | | **29 Nov 2024** | MPs from a pro-Russian party allied with the government submit a "foreign agents" bill modelled on laws in Russia and Georgia, which would brand groups with significant foreign funding. It targets exactly the donor model groups like CRTA rely on. It has not been reported to have passed | | **25–26 Feb 2025** | Weeks after the Trump administration froze foreign aid, police raid CRTA, Civic Initiatives, the Trag Foundation and the Center for Practical Politics. The raid at CRTA and Istinomer lasts 28 hours. Belgrade's Higher Public Prosecutor's office opens a preliminary investigation into abuse of office and money laundering "by unidentified persons." It cites US officials' claims that USAID money was misused, and asks the US Justice Department for help | | **Sep 2026** | The pro-government daily *Novosti* claims CRTA is a "direct supporter" of the Student List, without evidence | | **Oct 2026** | [[Breitbart News]] reports that CRTA received about $832,000 of a $2.8 million USAID election-integrity grant, and *Novosti* republishes it on 21 October. After the election Breitbart presents the result as a defeat by a "'Deep State'-Backed Student Movement" | No charges against CRTA have been reported from the 2025 investigation. Dragan Popović, director of one of the other raided groups, called the raids "a senseless showing off of the authoritarian regime's muscles." ## The money CRTA's 2025 budget was about **€2.3 million**. Its largest donor, at nearly half, was the Swedish government's development agency. Others included the UK and German governments, the Netherlands, Canada, private foundations and the [[United States Agency for International Development]], which provided about 5% directly. USAID did advertise a multi-year "Elections Integrity Activity" grant for a Serbian group in 2023, which fits the scale of the Breitbart figure. The full amounts are not independently confirmed here. > [!important] ⭐ The finding: the referee was charged with fixing the game > Every attack on CRTA has the same structure. The organisation that measures the tilt in Serbian elections is accused of being the foreign hand behind the opposition. The 2025 raid borrowed its pretext from Washington, from the Trump administration's claims that USAID money had been used to manipulate foreign elections (see [[DOGE]]). In October 2026 the claim travelled back to an American outlet, and from there to a Serbian government paper, as evidence that the election was stolen from Vučić. Paying for election observation is what democracy aid is for. Treating that payment as proof of a conspiracy turns the monitoring of an election into interference in it. See [[Serbian Influence]]. ## See Also - [[Serbia]] · [[2026 Serbian Parliamentary Election]] · [[Serbian Student Movement]] · [[Serbian Influence]] · [[Aleksandar Vučić]] · [[Ana Brnabić]] · [[Media Capture]] · [[Fact-Checking]] · [[United States Agency for International Development]] · [[Color Revolution]] · [[Otpor!]]