The State Election Commission (SEC) informs that its teams are performing on-the-ground checks of the nearly 90,000 voters whose information was flagged as inconsistent.
No problems have been reported during the verification, during which the SEC teams use a questionnaire, and often come accompanied by representatives of political parties, civic organizations and the OSCE.
The parties representatives and the organizations are allowed to observe the process, but not to interfere with it.
Flagged voters are citizens who have the right to vote, but do not feature several databases of different state institutions that were examined by the SEC, indicating that they live outside of the country, may be deceased, or have other reasons to be flagged for further scrutiny.
The largely ethnic Albanian municipality of Cair in Skopje leads with the number of people that need to be double checked - 17,041 in total, including nearby municipalities of Butel and the largely Roma area of Shuto Orizari.
SEC is expected to increase the number of people working in this area, as in the areas of Kumanovo, Lipkovo and Staro Nagoricane, where 11,676 voters have been flagged for more detailed inquiries.
On top of the almost 90,000 people flagged for on-the-ground checks, another group of over 100,000 voters will have the data they provided examined administratively.
The opposition SDSM party, which insisted that up to half a million voters are what they call "phantoms" and which blames the voting registry on its string of electoral defeats, called on the SEC on Tuesday to give its estimate whether the electoral roll can be verified by June 5 when parliamentary elections are to take place.
"SEC voted by consensus to determine that there are 330,000 suspicious voters. This is by far the strongest verification that the past several electoral cycles in Macedonia were illegitimate. From these 330,000 voters, 124,000 have not been verified at all", SDSM Vice President Damjan Mancevski said.
Mancevski also complained because representatives of other political parties represented in the SEC took copies of the list of 90,000 flagged voters.
The list was published in full on Tuesday, just as the full voting registry was made available online a month ago.
Mancevski, whose party welcomed the publication of the full registry, called on the Directorate for Personal Data Protection to state its opinion on the publication of the list of flagged voters.
The ruling VMRO-DPMNE party responded to Mancevski's press conference on Tuesday, saying the release of the flagged voters list, that SDSM used to manipulate the public for months, insisting that there are serious issues in the voting registry.
VMRO-DPMNE pointed out that the criteria which were used to flag voters, and which have led to claims that hundreds of thousands of people are suspicious, were so broad that the SEC flagged even some top SDSM officials and well known journalists who support SDSM.
"The whole of Macedonia today realized that there are no phantom voters, unless SDSM considers its former officials Jani Makraduli, Gordan Georgiev and Blagoj Handziski as phantoms, the former leader of their youth wing Darko Davitkovski, the sister of the most defeated politician in Macedonia Radmila Sekerinska, the NGO sector's prima ballerina Mirjana Najceska and balanced journalists such as Erol Rizaov and Ida Protuger as phantoms", VMRO-DPMNE writes in its press release, pointing to persons close to SDSM who met the criteria to be flagged.
The list also includes the sister of Special Public Prosecutor Katica Janeva and politician Fiat Canovski. In its press release, the ruling party adds that SDSM has lost the past elections due to its destructive policies and continues to offer nothing more to the voters, which will be the reason for their "upcoming 10th defeat in a row on 5 June".