BOSNIA'S election organisers will decide today whether or not to postpone municipal elections, an OSCE spokeswoman said.
Officials from the Organisation for Security and Co operation in Europe (OSCE) are considering the postponement after allegations of serious irregularities in the registration of Serb refugees.
The Provisional Election Commission (PEC) will consider the possible postponement of municipal elections only, Ms Agota Kuperman said.
The Dayton peace agreement gave the OSCE a mandate to organise Bosnian elections. The election commission is OSCE's top rule making body for the poll.
More than 600,000 refugees have registered to vote in 55 countries around the world, representing about 20 per cent of Bosnia's total electorate. They are due to begin voting tomorrow.
Balloting inside Bosnia is on September 14th, when citizens are scheduled to elect municipal and cantonal assemblies, separate Muslim Croat and Serb parliaments, a national House of Representatives and a three man presidency.
A Sarajevo newspaper close to Bosnia's Muslim nationalist SDA party said yesterday the OSCE would postpone the municipal level elections until next spring because of the refugee registration problems. SDA has a representative on the election commission.
"I don't know what the source of the report is, but it is consistent with what I have heard from western diplomats and from inside the OSCE," said an OSCE staff member.
"The word is that Frowick has decided to postpone municipal elections but that he will wait for one more session of the PEC on Tuesday to take everyone's temperature on the issue."
Ambassador Robert Frowick, an American, heads the OSCE mission in Bosnia.
OSCE and independent monitors allege that Serb authorities have systematically discouraged refugees from registering to cast a ballot in the places they lived before the war.
Instead, the refugees were said to have been directed by their authorities to vote from strategic towns which had Muslim majorities before the 43 month Bosnian war, but which are now underpopulated as a result of "ethnic cleansing".
Diplomats explain the purpose of this electoral engineering is to secure Serb control over pivotal towns inside the 49 per cent of Bosnia known as the Serb republic, consolidating through the ballot box what was initially taken in war.