Turkish election board rules for recount in rest of Istanbul districts

The provincial election board in Istanbul on Thursday ruled that invalid votes cast in the metropolitan municipality election be recounted in the remaining districts.

This effectively annulled a decision by the 15 district election boards that rejected the recount, Haberturk daily reported on Thursday.

Earlier, all of the votes in 12 districts and invalid votes in another 12 districts of Istanbul were planned to be recounted following the ruling AK Party (AKP)’s appeals.

With the latest election board ruling on the remaining 15 districts, the recount is now expected to be carried out in all 39 districts of Istanbul.

Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has the right to object the board’s ruling on recount. If the party’s objection is accepted, the Supreme Election Board (YSK) will step in to place a final judgment on the issue.

The ruling AKP has issued appeals to the provincial and district bodies of YSK claiming the results had been impacted by invalid votes and voting irregularities, after its shock defeat in major cities, including Turkey’s business center Istanbul and the capital Ankara.

The governing party had said earlier there were more than 300,000 invalid votes.

There was a tight race between AKP’s Binali Yildirim and CHP’s Ekrem Imamoglu in Istanbul on Sunday. Imamoglu got ahead of Yildirim by a relatively slight margin of around 27,000 votes in a city of some 15 million people, according to the initial results.

Commenting on the recount of votes in Istanbul, Imamoglu said on Wednesday that he does not consider the possibility of canceling of the elections.

“The number of valid votes [on both sides] are very close. At the end of the day, the figures are not effective enough to change the result,” he said.

While the pro-government media have been claiming that the gap between the two candidates is narrowing quickly, CHP’s Imamoglu told a press conference on Thursday that he is still ahead of Yildirim by 19,552 votes.

“The [recount] process is still ongoing. The recount of the invalid votes in 11 districts [of Istanbul] has ended. The difference [between the votes] is 19,552. These differences [increases and decreases in the vote counts] are continuing in a balanced manner,” stated Imamoglu.

Imamoglu later tweeted that recounts in Istanbul’s 14 districts, where there were a total of 89,255 invalid votes, had been completed. He added that he was 18,871 votes ahead of his rival Yildirim.

The state-run Anadolu Agency (AA), the only news agency covering Turkey’s election results since 2016, suddenly stopped reporting data at 23:20 on Sunday.

This was at a time when Imamoglu was only a few thousand votes behind Yildirim and with only a few ballot boxes left uncounted.

Shortly after the interruption of data reporting, Yildirim declared victory even though the race was too close to call.

AA’s puzzling decision to stop data reports when the opposition candidate started closing in on Yildirim has led to conspiracy theories about election manipulation.

Dissidents of Erdogan suspect that the close ties between the ruling AKP and AA could have led to manipulation of the election results even in the past.

Mahmut Tanal, an MP for CHP on Thursday reacted against a reporter of the pro-government TV channel A Haber. The CHP deputy claims he reacted after hearing that CHP votes received in Umraniye, a district of Istanbul where invalid votes had just been recounted, reported by A Haber as less than they actually were.

“You’re not giving the right information. You’re misinforming Turkey. You have to present Turkey with the right data [on election results],” Tanal warned, while A Haber’s reporter was on the air.

Previously, Imamoglu claimed that AKP has demanded recounts in Istanbul in order to buy some time to destroy evidence of corruption in the metropolitan municipality.

“People are destroying files [in the municipality]. There are those who destroy files and those who tidy up their offices [after the elections]. What’s this all about? I will call them to account for every kuruş [1 percent of Turkish Lira] coming out of people’s pockets in Istanbul,” Imamoglu said referring to the corruption allegations against AKP members.

CHP filed a criminal complaint against two former Istanbul mayors, following audit reports released by the Court of Accounts in October 2018 which revealed a 753 million TL worth of malpractice and illicit spending that occurred within offices that operate under the municipality run by the AKP in 2017.

From December 17 to December 25 in 2013, a total of 89 people were detained as part of a corruption probe, in which the governing AKP faced serious allegations of corruption.

In 2018, police officers who carried out the corruption investigations in 2013 were sentenced to life imprisonment by an Istanbul court.

Erdogan’s party yet to concede defeat in Istanbul amid vote recount

 

 

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from IPA NEWS https://ipa.news/2019/04/05/turkish-election-board-rules-for-recount-in-rest-of-istanbul-districts/