TİP deems election results ‘dubious’ due to irregularities

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Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) deputy chair Doğan Ergün on May 17 held a press conference in Istanbul about the irregularities of the election results in the Supreme Election Council (YSK) database.

Ergün said they objected to more than 420 ballot box results in Istanbul, İzmir and Antalya provinces which might change their number of deputies in the Parliament, ANKA News Agency reported. According to unofficial results, TİP will have four deputies in the upcoming term if there will be no change. 

“We do not want to think that there is bad faith here (to wrongly record the results). We would like to think that these are various inadvertent mistakes. That's why we object,” Ergün noted.

However, Ergün said they have been observing such irregularities since 2015. “In many ballot boxes and schools, full control is achieved by using the ruling party members and various state resources. To the extent that they manage to do this, all the votes are written by their parties.”

“Statistics tells us something. All over the world, except for authoritarian states, voting around 95 percent in any place where fair and democratic elections can be held and at least certain rules are followed is an anomaly, it is an anomaly indicator. Because voting around 95 percent means that no one gets sick in that electoral district, no one dies after the voter lists are formed, nothing important happens to anyone,” Ergün said.

“The number of ballot boxes in which 95 percent or more of the votes were cast in the 14 May elections in Turkey is close to 20,000 (out of 191,885), and the number of voters here is around 4.2 million. (The results of) approximately 20,000 ballot boxes where 4.2 million people voted are clearly dubious. The number of ballot boxes with 98 percent or more participation is around 7,000 in which 825,130 people voted. In the ballot boxes where more than 98 percent of the votes were cast, the vote share of the ruling People's Alliance is close to 60 percent. It has received 13-14 percent more than they normally get. There are also ballot boxes with 100 percent or more votes. Police officers or various government officials voted there with the duty paper. The number of ballot boxes with 100 percent or more votes here is 4,841. The number of votes cast in the ballot boxes here is 422,000, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan received 61 percent of the votes here. Here, the Nationalist Movement Party’s (MHP) vote share seems to be more than 13 percent,” Ergün added.

In another example, Ergün said “The voting rate in the ballot box numbered 1,156 in the center of Şırnak is 762 percent. In other words, 7-7.5 times more people voted. In the 154 ballot boxes where 100 percent or more of the votes were cast, no votes were cast for the opposition Nation Alliance.”

Ergün added that all these examples show that there is a clear “sham.” “We think that this operation as a whole is an operation that favors the MHP. In such boxes, for example, the MHP's vote share in the June 7 elections has increased from 2 percent to 16 percent now.”

“We will not allow the nightmare of Tayyip Erdoğan to fall on this country once again. We can achieve this. We see that millions of our citizens did not go to the polls. We will convince them, for this we will start working on the street,” he lastly added.

His remarks came after voters reported that results were incorrectly recorded into the YSK’s system especially in some polling stations in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia, where the Green Left Party (YSP) is particularly strong. Some social media users claimed that YSP’s votes were recorded as belonging to the ruling coalition’s far-right partner MHP.

Earlier on May 17, main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy chair Muharrem Erkek said they objected to the results of 2,269 ballot boxes for the presidential election and 4,825 ballot boxes for the general election. “We track every single vote, even if it doesn't change the overall results,” he added.