Turkey Opposition Party Files Complaints Over Irregularities in Ballot Boxes Following Elections

The main Turkish opposition party filed complaints this week against irregularities found in thousands of ballot boxes following the recent elections over the weekend. The complaints come as the presidential race is headed toward a runoff in the coming weeks between incumbent President Tayyip Erdogan and major opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

On Wednesday, the Turkish opposition party, the secularist Republican People’s Party or CHP, said it filed complaints over potential irregularities in thousands of ballot boxes following Sunday’s elections. The CHP’s deputy chairman Muharrem Erkek said the irregularities at the ballot box ranged from one singly miscounted vote to hundreds of miscounted votes. Erkek said the CHP filed formal complaints over 2,269 ballot boxes nationwide for the presidential election and 4,825 for the parliamentary races, though the latter represented a small portion of the overall number.

“We are following every single vote, even if it does not change the overall results,” Erkek told reporters in Ankara.

CHP officials acknowledged that the objections would unlikely be able to alter the results of the presidential votes, which saw Erdogan leading over Kilicdaroglu. Both candidates, however, failed to reach the 50 percent threshold needed to claim victory and would go into a runoff on May 28. Kilicdaroglu, who received 44.9 percent of the total vote, marked the biggest challenge to Erdogan’s 20-year rule, while a third candidate Sinan Ogan only received 5.17 percent.

Kilicdaroglu is backed by a six-party opposition alliance that includes the CHP, which urged younger voters to turn out and support Kilicdaroglu in the runoff.

Also this week, Kilicdaroglu sought to court the vote of nationalists by turning to anti-migrant rhetoric, accusing Erdogan of letting in 10 million “irregular” migrants into the country on Wednesday, the day after the CHP filed the objections.

“We will not abandon our homeland to this mentality that allowed 10 million irregular migrants to come among us,” said Kilicdaroglu in a video shared on Twitter, warning that the number of migrants entering Turkey would go up to 30 million, but did not cite any evidence to back up his accusation. “Those who love our homeland, come to the ballot box.”

Photo: Dima Rogachevskiy/Unsplash(CC by 2.0)