Turkish Opposition Documents Thousands of Ballot Box Irregularities in Presidential Election

Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), on Wednesday filed complaints about thousands of alleged irregularities at ballot boxes in Sunday’s election, when incumbent authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dramatically outperformed his poll numbers and came within half a point of winning an immediate victory over favored challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

CHP officials admitted their challenges were highly unlikely to nullify the first round of the election, which will be settled by a runoff between Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu on May 28. Some of the irregularities amounted to a single miscounted vote, while others allegedly affected hundreds of ballots.

CHP complained about a grand total of 2,269 ballot boxes nationwide in the presidential election and 4,825 in concurrent parliamentary races – a sizable number, but given the massive 88.8 percent reported turnout in the election and Erdogan’s lead of almost five points over Kilicdaroglu, probably not enough to change the outcome even if all of CHP’s challenges were validated.

“We do not have strong evidence to say irregularities can change the presidential race results or get another opposition candidate elected to the parliament. Since Erdogan officially started his election campaign yesterday, I believe the opposition alliance should also channel its energy into the runoff,” advised Mehmet Emin Ekmen, deputy chair of the DEVA party, a member of Kilicdaroglu’s six-party political alliance.

International observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) criticized the Erdogan government on Monday for failing to handle the ballots in a sufficiently transparent manner, and for blocking two OSCE observers for dubious reasons. The OSCE also said its complaints would be unlikely to change the outcome of the race.

Skeptics of the election’s validity were particularly suspicious of Erdogan’s remarkable popularity in most of the provinces severely affected by the massive earthquakes in February.

Poor earthquake response, and shocking levels of corruption in the construction industry during Erdogan’s 20 years in power, were seen as massive political liabilities for the incumbent, but he and his AKP party wound up romping through 10 of the 11 provinces hit by the quake. Erdogan lost only in Hatay, the province hit hardest by the quakes.

Reuters interviewed earthquake province residents who said the region broke for Erdogan because its devout Muslim population responded to the Islamist elements of his campaign, and Kilicdaroglu did not convince them he could have done a better job with the response.

“Earthquake survivors had seriously criticized the government response in polls and they said they would not vote for them. But these people were also looking for an answer to the question of ‘who will rebuild my house, who will rebuild my workplace?’ They see that it is Erdogan who can do this,” said pollster Mehmet Ali Kulat. 

As for the religious angle, Kilicdaroglu is a secularist who advocates returning to the principles of modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – principles Erdogan has aggressively dismantled as he sells a vision of returning to the glories of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk founded the CHP.

In the final weeks of the campaign, the normally soft-spoken Kilicdaroglu – the man known for making heart emojis with his fingers on the campaign trail – called out certain popular historians as “traitors” and “not even human” for spreading unsubstantiated smears that Ataturk had an affair with his own adopted daughter, and that Ataturk’s mother was a prostitute.

Kilicdaroglu himself is an Alevi, a minority Islamic sect that few prominent Turkish politicians have admitted belonging to. Kilicdaroglu’s open declaration of his faith was applauded by many for shattering an unreasonable taboo in Turkish society and promoting religious diversity, but it apparently alienated the hardcore Muslims and nationalists that Erdogan appealed to.

Erdogan ran hard against Kilicdaroglu’s secular governing philosophy, and his surrogates did a canny job of playing on anti-Alevi sentiments, although his presidency has been fairly decent to the Alevis over the past two decades.

Erdogan’s allies managed to paint Kilicdaroglu as the one who was looking to start a religious battle in Turkey by tearing down Erdogan’s Islamist institutions and flaunting his offbeat religious identity. They also linked him to pro-Kurdish parties and the Kurdish separatists of the PKK, the great boogeyman of Erdogan’s government. These tactics appear to have worked well enough to blunt the political damage from the earthquakes for the incumbent president.

Kilicdaroglu’s campaign took a somewhat surprising “no more Mr. Nice Guy” turn heading into the runoff, as he accused Erdogan on Wednesday of planning to flood Turkey with millions of “irregular migrants” and challenging nationalists to vote for him instead.

“We will not abandon our homeland to this mentality that allowed 10 million irregular migrants to come among us. Those who love their homeland, come to the ballot box,” he said in a video posted on Twitter. He warned the number of “irregular migrants” could soar to over 30 million if Erdogan is re-elected.

Al Jazeera News expressed some confusion at precisely which group of migrants Kilicdaroglu was talking about. Turkey is well-known for having the world’s largest refugee population, thanks to a decade of vicious civil war in neighboring Syria, but the current total is closer to 4 million than the 10 million Kilicdaroglu claimed. 

Al Jazeera suspected Kilicdaroglu, now the underdog instead of the favorite going into the general election, was making a last-ditch play for the voters of third-place candidate Sinan Ogan, who ran heavily on repatriating refugees. 

Ogan is greatly enjoying his role as a kingmaker and seems to be in no hurry to endorse either of the runoff candidates. His views on returning to Ataturk’s secular government are similar to Kilicdaroglu’s, but Ogan severely dislikes the Kurds, and he stated on Monday he will not support Kilicdaroglu unless the challenger promises to make no concessions to pro-Kurdish parties.