Turkey’s opposition claim ballot irregularities in Sunday’s polls
Istanbul, Turkey – Opposition parties in Turkey have reported thousands of discrepancies and irregularities in voting in the presidential and parliamentary elections, casting a shadow over the polls conducted on Sunday.
The Cumhuriyet Halk (Republican People’s Party, CHP) and the Yeşil Sol Party (Green Left Party, YSP) have been raising concerns and complaints since Sunday about the discrepancies between the registered count in polling stations and the votes entered in the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) system.
On Wednesday, CHP deputy chairman Muharrem Erkek said the party had found irregularities in 7,094 ballot boxes after checking more than 201,000 ballot boxes from home and abroad.
About 4,825 of the CHP’s objections related to parliamentary votes and 2,269 to the presidential election.
Turkey’s presidential election will go to a second round on May 28, after neither incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu secured an outright 50 percent majority on Sunday.
Erdogan led the polls with 49.5 percent of the vote and Kilicdaroglu with 44.89 percent.
Erkek said the votes for Kilicdaroglu had been wrongly allocated to Muharrem Ince, who withdrew from the presidential race three days before the election, leaving him not enough time to print new ballots without his name.
Speaking to journalists in Ankara on Wednesday, Erkek said Erdogan also received additional votes, without providing any evidence.
“We follow every vote, even if it doesn’t change the overall results,” Erkek said.
In parliamentary polls, Erdogan’s Adalet ve Kalkınma (Justice and Development Party, AK Party) received the most votes.
The Milliyetçi Hareket Party (Nationalist Movement Party, MHP), the alliance party of the AK Party, beat expectations with more than 10 percent of the vote.
The YSP, which fielded parliamentary candidates from the pro-Kurdish Halkların Demokratik Party (People’s Democratic Party, HDP) over a legal shutdown threat against the latter, said it had uncovered more than 1,000 cases of incorrect entry.
“We have no evidence to say whether there is organized malice behind these mistakes and oversights or whether someone is deliberately trying to influence these outcomes,” YSP election spokesman Mehmet Rustu Tiryaki said Tuesday.
The party supported Kilicdaroglu, who leads a six-party alliance, for the presidency.
Voting irregularities
The election authority will release its figures on Friday. It did, however, share information about the votes with political parties.
The CHP told voters to compare the data published on the YSK website with the freely available data from the polling stations. That led to people posting discrepancies on social media, including cases in southeastern Turkey with a Kurdish majority where HDP/YSP votes appeared to have been transferred to the MHP.
While election campaigns in Turkey have been criticized for giving the ruling party an unfair advantage over the use of state resources, control of the media and legal intimidation of opponents, the actual vote itself was believed to be largely safe.
However, YSK president Ahmet Yener condemned the claims made online as “baseless” and “intended to mislead the public”, adding that the organization’s system was “transparent”.
Roman Udot, co-chair of Golos, a Russian election data watchdog now based in Lithuania, said a study of YSK’s data from previous Turkish elections revealed “very strange things”.
“We found 3,500 polling stations where the turnout was over 100 percent, in one case over 800 percent, which is mathematically impossible,” he told a press conference in Istanbul on Wednesday.
He added that data from the 2018 polls showed that the number of registered voters in Ankara was 3 percent lower for the presidential race than the parliamentary vote.
On Tuesday evening, a group of people keeping a ‘democracy watch’ outside the YSK offices in Ankara were detained by police.
“It is clear that the YSK is clearly illegitimate and trying to usurp the will of the people,” Ilay Eroglu, a protester, told local media.
“We will protect our voices and our will and we will not be victims of the same illegality again.”