Erdogan loyalists ‘doctored ballots’

Turkey’s opposition is claiming tens of thousands of votes cast in Sunday’s elections were entered wrongly into the official registration system.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan with his wife Ermine acknowledge supporters at the AK Party headquarters in Ankara. Picture: AFP

Turkey’s opposition is claiming that tens of thousands of votes cast in Sunday’s elections were entered wrongly into the official registration system, potentially handing President Recep ­Tayyip Erdogan and his party a larger share.

Muharrem Erkek, vice-chairman of the CHP, the main opposition party, said discrepancies had been detected in results from 2269 ballot boxes for the presidential polls and in 4825 boxes for the parliamentary polls. There are 201,807 boxes in total.

According to the electoral board’s figures, Mr Erdogan took 49.5 per cent in the presidential elections and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the opposition’s presidential candidate, took 44.9 per cent.

In some cases where Mr Kilicdaroglu took more votes than Mr Erdogan, their tallies appear to have been swapped. In other cases, Mr Kilicdaroglu’s votes were transferred to Muharrem Ince – a fringe candidate who pulled out of the race on Thursday – after ballot slips had been printed, meaning he still ­appeared as an option on polling day. He took 0.4 per cent of the vote, according to the electoral board, and a fourth candidate, Sinan Ogan, took 5.2 per cent.

A run-off vote between Mr Erdogan and Mr Kilicdaroglu will be held on May 28. Mr Erkek said that where discrepancies were confirmed, the register was being amended.

The results confounded pollsters, most of whom expected Mr Kilicdaroglu to win. “Since the beginning of March we have done 53,000 interviews, both face-to-face and over the telephone. In not a single survey was Erdogan ahead of Kilicdaroglu,” Can Selcuki, founder of the polling company Turkey Report, said. In the parliamentary elections Mr Erdogan’s coalition scraped a majority of 323 seats in the 600-seat parliament with 49.5 per cent of the vote.

There appear to have been multiple instances where votes awarded to Mr Erdogan’s AK Party or the allied nationalist MHP were inflated, mostly to the detriment of the HDP, the main Kurdish party, and the left-wing Workers Party. The HDP, which ran in the parliamentary elections under the party name Green Left, said it had raised ­objections separately over the results from 1000 ballot boxes.

Presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Picture: Getty Images

The discrepancies began to emerge on Tuesday when the CHP opened a website allowing Turks to check the “wet signature” tallies, which are counted at the polling stations and watched by monitors and independent observers, against the numbers entered into the electoral board’s register.

The presidential communications bureau, run by Mr Erdogan’s arch-loyalist press chief, Fahrettin Altun, hit back, claiming that the results on the CHP’s website were not from the electoral board. But that is impossible to check: the officially registered results, searchable by ballot box, are usually publicly available on the board’s website as soon as they have been entered but by Wednesday morning that data was still unavailable. The CHP’s website was also briefly blocked on Tuesday night.

It is unlikely that the transferred votes would have been enough to change the outcome of either election, but the row has further eroded Turks’ trust in the electoral board, which has final jurisdiction over election results and is dominated by Erdogan loyalists. In 2019 it overturned the results of Istanbul’s local election, which the opposition had won by a narrow margin, citing irregularities at some polling booths. Mr Erdogan and his allies had leant on the board to take the decision.

Mr Erkek vowed that the opposition would follow each vote “one by one”.

Ahmet Davutoglu, the former prime minister who defected from Mr Erdogan’s party, said that every wet signature result might have to be re-entered into the electoral board’s system. Kilicdaroglu has yet to make a statement on the claims.

The Times