According to proposed changes to Article 39 of the Election Code, a person cannot be a citizen observer if (a) he/she had been a party-appointed election commission member, election subject, or representative of an election subject in the previously held ordinary elections or extraordinary or (b) he/she was a party donor since the beginning of the year of the last ordinary or extraordinary elections. This effort to filter out party-affiliated individuals from the range of possible citizen observers is a positive development. It goes a long way to implement a long-standing and reiterated ODIHR recommendation to address the practice of electoral contestants misusing citizen observation by registering their activists as citizen observers in order to bolster their presence in polling stations. Such practice has been observed to undermine the impartiality of the citizen observation exercise in past elections, including overt interference in election day proceedings.