On
Turkey's Fraudulent Election Tomorrow
by Daniel Pipes
• Jun 6, 2015 at 4:38 pm
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
In my Washington
Times op-ed yesterday, I called Turkey's election tomorrow
"among the least important" in the country's recent history. In
part, this is because there is less doubt than ever before among informed
analysts that the election will be marred by fraud. I share some of their
insights below.
Sayed
Abdel-Meguid, Al-Ahram's excellent Turkey correspondent, first
tells how Erdoğan has hogged the airwaves to the exclusion of everyone
else in the run up to the June 7 elections, then he tells about the AKP's
backup plans:
According to some sources, certain
instructions are to be delivered to public school directors who will be
supervising the ballot boxes and the tallying of votes. In preparation for
this, school directors from parties other than the ruling JDP [i.e., AKP]
have been dismissed. In addition, in blatant violation of the electoral
law, and as the Supreme Election Board looked on without saying a word,
JDP officials convened a large meeting with electoral ward officials. So
clearly something is being cooked up in the manner of the recipes that
adjusted the results of the municipal elections in March 2014.
In this regard, a survey published 7
May reports that a considerable majority of Turkish voters expect the
government to rig the polls. The study, "Turkish public opinion
dynamics ahead of the June 2015 elections," conducted by the Open
Society Institute, Koç University and Ohio State University, found that
77 per cent of voters oppose the government and do not expect that the
elections will be fair, and that 73 per cent of voters do not approve of
the presidential system Erdoğan is bent on imposing in his name.
Thomas
Siebert further weighs in on concerns about unfair tactics:
Erdogan's critics are concerned that the
president might resort to foul play to ensure an AKP landslide. The
secularist Republican People's Party (CHP), Turkey's biggest opposition
group, says it will send a total of 525,000 volunteers to observe
vote-counting on polling day. One reason the opposition is worried is
that several power cuts hindered vote-counting after local elections last
year, triggering accusations of vote-rigging to the AKP's benefit. At the
time, the government said a cat had entered a power distribution unit and
caused a short circuit.
|
HDP
Co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş says he's confident his party will pass
the 10 percent threshold to win seats in parliament.
|
Wondering out loud what the problem this year might be. A rat?
Al-Monitor senior columnist Cengiz
Çandar notes AKP fears of the Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party
(Halkların Demokratik Partisi, or HDP) making the 10 percent threshold
and getting into parliament, thereby depriving the AKP of the
super-majority it needs to make constitutional changes to enhance the
president's power:
Many worry that election security is
not guaranteed and will not be guaranteed on the day of the election.
This could mean that the HDP's passing the 10% threshold might not just
depend on the electorate, but on officialdom as well. There are worries
that there might be a lot of election
rigging by AKP leaders to push the HDP below the election threshold.
Gareth
Jenkins worries that expectations of fraud are so high there may be
post-election unrest regardless:
Opinion polls suggest that support for
the HDP is currently running at around 10 per cent. If the party fails to
win any seats on June 7, most of its supporters are likely to assume that
it is because of electoral fraud, and distrust of the Erdoğan regime will
deepen still further as a result. There is a high risk that this
resentment will trigger a cascade of civil unrest, both in southeast
Turkey and in urban areas in the west of the country.
In "Turkish
civic society mobilizes against election fraud," Al-Monitor
columnist Kadri Gürsel reviews the discussion about this particularly
sensitive issue.
Remarkably, a significant part of the
Turkish public expect irregularities in the count, or, to put it plainly,
vote-rigging. A survey made public May 5 by Koç University academics Ali
Çarkoğlu and Erdem Aytaç provided a striking illustration of how popular
confidence in fair elections has eroded.
According to the survey, ... 46% of
voters are convinced the ballots will not be counted properly. The figure
stands at 15% even among AKP supporters and reaches up to 72% among
opposition voters. Similarly, 43% of the electorate believes the June 7
elections will not be fair. The party breakdown shows that 11% of AKP
backers and 69% of opposition supporters hold this opinion. ...
Similar surveys ahead of the 2007
general election found that 28% of voters believed the polls would not be
fair; the figure was 30% in 2011. A 13-point increase four years later
sounds a serious alarm.
Of course, vote rigging is more effective in close races. A Kurdish
figure, Murat Karayilan, explains
what this means for HDP:
I don't think the HDP could surpass the
threshold with 10.5% or 11% of the vote because they [the government and
its supporters] will be cheating. They will be invalidating votes or
stealing votes.
He thinks the HDP has to win 12 percent of the vote to make sure it
passes the 10 percent threshold.
An NGO called Democracy's Overseers produced a booklet,
sarcastically titled The Manual of a Vote Thief, pointing to
common means of effecting electoral fraud in Turkey:
Moving voters from one constituency to
another with the help of civil registry officials and neighborhood
headmen.
Removing voters of rival parties from
electoral registers.
Multiple voting.
Falsifying votes, whereby surplus
ballot papers are stamped in advance and arranged to match electoral
registers. Bags full of fake votes are then put in place of the real
ones.
Power outages during vote counting.
This last has became notorious, as Gürsel explains:
Multiple, simultaneous power outages
became a hallmark of the 2014 municipal polls, going down in Turkish
political history as the "cat in the transformer" incident.
While vote counting was underway in the evening of March 30, simultaneous
power cuts hit 35 provinces across Turkey, including Istanbul. Two days
later, Energy Minister Taner Yıldız went down in history by claiming that
a cat had slipped into an electrical transformer unit, causing a
short-circuit failure. "Cats" have since become a sarcastic
metaphor for vote theft in opposition jargon.
Because opposition parties have failed to focus on voter fraud, others
have taken up the slack, and especially a group that emerged out of the
2013 Gezi Park protests called Vote and Beyond (which in Turkish
comes out euphonically as Oy ve Ötesi). Gürsel continues:
The movement made its name during the
2014 municipal elections when it deployed 30,000 volunteer observers at
polling stations across the country. For the June 7 elections, Vote and
Beyond plans to mobilize up to 70,000 volunteers to monitor vote counting
at 106,000 ballot boxes in 162 districts in 45 of Turkey's 81 provinces.
The 162 districts include the country's 100 largest districts and 62
districts where the margin between the first and the second party is less
than 3%. In other words, those are the districts where electoral fraud
could sway the overall outcome.
Gürsel further notes that
Vote and Beyond volunteers will be able
to watch only the vote-casting and counting process, which is the
observable part of the election, taking place at 175,000 ballot boxes in
970 districts across the country. The process of entering the counts into
the centralized computer system and the announcement of final results is
not open to observation. To compensate for that, the group has prepared
its own software, a sophisticated program of cross-checking and control,
which will be used to compare the official results and the results the
group will collect through its observers.
Even low-level fraud can make a difference. As Vote and Beyond
Chairman Sercan Çelebi points
out,
An average of 370 votes are cast in
each ballot box. If three votes change place in each ballot box, this
means a 1% shift in the national total overall.
Thus, even a sliver of garden variety fraud could be sufficient to
leave the HDP out of parliament and ensure continued AKP supremacy.
Daniel Pipes is President of the
Middle East Forum
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment