The main opposition party in Turkey, the social democrat CHP, announced on Wednesday that it will challenge the count of thousands of ballot boxes from the last presidential and parliamentary elections, due to alleged irregularities in the recording of the results of the votes. In these elections, the current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, obtained 49.5% of the votes -his main opponent 44.8%- and renewed a majority in Parliament together with a coalition of far-right and Islamist parties.
Days after the elections, the Supreme Election Commission (YSK) has not yet published box-by-box voting data, but opposition parties have had access to thousands of vote counts that have errors in their registration. For example, in a school in Istanbul, Kiliçdaroglu received 260 votes according to the table count, but only 76 were registered in the system. CHP Vice President Muharrem Erkek announced that the opposition coalition – formed by the CHP together with nationalist and liberal parties – challenged irregularities in 2,269 ballot boxes in the presidential elections and 4,825 in the parliamentary ones. “We are studying each vote, even if it does not change the overall results,” Erkek warned.
For its part, the Kurdish leftist party (YSP) announced the challenge of 1,000 ballot boxes. In these elections, a total of 201,807 ballot boxes were installed in Turkey and abroad, so 1% of them are contested. In the presidential elections it cannot cause major changes because the difference between the results of Erdogan and Kiliçdaroglu is more than two million votes, but in Parliament it could cause a dance of deputies. In fact, last Tuesday the YSP challenged an error in the vote register, which, if approved, would give it one more deputy in Parliament and another to the nationalist IYI party, in coalition with Kiliçdaroglu.
Meanwhile, the Kurdish Islamist party Hüdapar, in a coalition with Erdogan, would lose two of the four deputies it has won in the elections. “It is very difficult to be able to challenge irregularities without clear access to the data,” Roman Udot, co-director of Golos, an organization that conducts forensic analysis of electoral processes, told a news conference. While waiting for the registered counts to be published on the Electoral Commission (YSK) website, Golos has analyzed the results of observers, the media and parties. They have detected signs of irregularities in some five hundred schools, with a higher voter record than people registered in these centers. Also disparate figures between the number of voters in the presidential and parliamentary elections and a greater number of invalid votes in traditional strongholds of Erdogan’s party, the Islamist AKP.
The Turkish organization Oy ve Ötesi, which deployed observers to at least one in four polling stations to report possible irregularities, pointed to small incidents last Sunday, such as citizens trying to vote more than once. The main opposition coalition organized its own system of recounting votes, which failed on election night. In addition, it failed to deploy observers in at least 15% of the polling stations, working at a disadvantage when reporting anomalies. For the moment, the government has not ruled on the challenges, but the opposition parties have already started a campaign to once again mobilize thousands of volunteers to continue the electoral process for the second round of presidential elections.
This weekend Turkish citizens abroad are expected to vote again. The authorities have given four days to vote outside of Turkey, except in the United States, Canada, England and Australia, which reduced the period to two days. The opposition interpreted the move as an attempt to limit the vote in countries where Erdogan’s opponent, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, got more votes than the current Turkish president. Shortly thereafter, the Electoral Commission extended the voting period in these countries following complaints from the opposition.
The election campaign has also not been fair in terms of equal coverage in the media. Nearly 90% of the media are in the hands of companies close to the government, which have scheduled interviews with Erdogan and covered his campaign, barely mentioning the opposition proposal. Days before the elections, the Government ordered Twitter to block dozens of accounts of analysts and users critical of the Government, a measure that provoked the anger of users against the owner of the social network, Elon Musk, for complying with the directive of Ankara.
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