Rigging the Vote Won’t Be Easy for Erdogan

Ahead of Turkey’s election on May 14, many commentators have heralded the vote as a historic opportunity to restore democracy. The hype is well-founded: Strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s popularity has suffered significantly from the ongoing economic crisis and recent earthquake disaster in the country’s southeast. As support for Erdogan has fallen to record lows, opinion polls show an exceptionally tight race.

Read more of FP’s coverage of Turkey’s pivotal elections.

The chances of victory are so high that Turkey’s notoriously splintered opposition parties have cast aside their differences and joined forces in an unprecedented bid to unseat Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Secular, Islamist, leftist, and right-wing parties are campaigning together on behalf of Erdogan’s main opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 74, of the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Even those in Turkey’s Kurdish minority are rooting for Kilicdaroglu, despite the CHP’s nationalist reputation.

But a major question looms: Will Erdogan—an autocrat with near-total control of Turkey’s state institutions, judiciary, and media—actually allow himself to lose? The president has gone to great lengths to guarantee victory for the AKP, including by polarizing the public, persecuting opposition figures, and muzzling independent media. Allegations of irregularity and fraud cast a shadow over elections in 2014, 2017, and 2019. Given the high stakes of the upcoming vote, fears that the government and its supporters will once again resort to such tactics are understandable.

However, rigging elections in Turkey is no easy feat. Despite growing repression, the country’s civil society remains vibrant and hell-bent on defending election integrity. Civil society organizations have played a heroic role in recent elections by mobilizing election monitoring networks and increasing transparency. With Erdogan looking vulnerable, they are now gearing up to be more organized and vigilant than ever. Whichever tactics Erdogan and the AKP deploy are sure to face close scrutiny—and formidable resistance.

As Erdogan dug in his heels, the problems grew more serious. Turkey’s 2017 constitutional referendum, which replaced its parliamentary democracy with a presidential regime, was especially controversial. Voters said they witnessed ballot stuffing and other irregularities; videos showed people shoving multiple envelopes into ballot boxes and stamping multiple ballots in a row. At a polling station in Izmir, voters alleged that an election official had signed ballot slips on behalf of people who didn’t show up. None of these incidents amounted to large-scale rigging, but they could have shaped the vote. A German lawmaker observing the election on behalf of the Council of Europe said such tactics could have manipulated as many as 2.5 million votes nationwide—roughly twice the margin of victory.

Similar issues may appear during this year’s election. Voters or ballot officials could stuff boxes with pre-stamped ballots before, during, or after the voting process. Officials might allow citizens to vote on behalf of family or friends or to enter the polling booths in groups—both of which are illegal. They could also argue over whether a vote should be counted or discarded. Formally, all ballots that are damaged or unstamped must be tossed. But Turkish authorities have a knack for changing those rules at the last minute, creating confusion.

The good news is that there are checks in place to prevent irregularities and attempts at fraud. One important mechanism is the presence of opposition representatives at polling stations. Each Turkish polling station has a committee of ballot officials that oversees the process, counts the votes, and sends the ballots to the High Election Council. By law, these committees are made up of two people appointed by the government and one representative of each party in the Turkish parliament.

Opposition parties haven’t always had the capacity to send members to all polling stations. In 2018, some 11,000 of Turkey’s 180,000 ballot boxes recorded zero votes for the CHP, which suggested the party had no presence in these rooms on election day. This year, the opposition aims to ensure that each of Turkey’s 191,884 polling stations has a representative. Last year, a CHP-led alliance of six opposition parties created an election security task force and devised a road map for comprehensive election monitoring.

These efforts are promising, but even if these parties assign a representative to every station, government-appointed local authorities could try to block them from doing their jobs. In 2017, authorities reportedly prevented 170 opposition members from entering polling stations. Meanwhile, those who managed to go in said that ballot officials in several cities conducted the vote count without opposition presence in the room—and allegedly validated voting slips hours after the vote count.

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So what else can be done? Enter civil society. In Turkey, citizens across the political spectrum cherish the right to elect their leaders. Given the growing public mistrust of the government and uncertainty over election integrity in recent years, several civic groups have emerged to improve election transparency and safeguard against fraud. They have played a crucial role in past elections by documenting and warning election officials about potential fraud and irregularities during the voting process and by publishing the vote counts they recorded at each ballot box—enabling the public to verify or object to the High Election Council’s official tally later in the evening.

One such group is Oy ve Otesi (Vote and Beyond), Turkey’s first nongovernmental organization (NGO) focused on civil election monitoring, which was founded in 2013 by former McKinsey consultant Sercan Celebi and his associates. In the last decade, the group has mobilized and trained tens of thousands of people to monitor seven nationwide votes: two municipal, two presidential, and two parliamentary elections, as well as the 2017 referendum. With all that experience, Oy ve Otesi is Turkey’s most trusted NGO in this field.

A new organization called Turkiye Gonulluleri, or Volunteers of Turkey, is descended from a network organized by the CHP in 2019, when Erdogan rejected the AKP’s narrow loss in the Istanbul mayoral election, leading to a rerun three months later. In response, the CHP mobilized tens of thousands of volunteer election monitors in the rerun; they went as far as to sleep on top of bags full of sealed, counted ballots until they were transported to the High Election Council in Ankara for the official tally. Their efforts paid off: The CHP’s candidate won the second round by more than 800,000 votes. Today, Turkiye Gonulluleri styles itself as the official civil monitoring organization of the CHP-led opposition alliance.

Both groups are now working day and night to help secure the May 14 election. They have launched social media campaigns to rally people to vote and produced videos guiding voters through the process, including bringing the right IDs and correctly stamping, folding, and sealing the ballots. The civil society organizations work with each other and local NGOs to help underprivileged voters access polling stations. One campaign provides bus tickets to anyone displaced by the February earthquake and needs to travel to vote. Turkiye Gonulluleri has offered financial assistance to college students to help them commute to their polling stations.

The organizations’ most important work remains mobilizing civil election monitors. Both groups work with opposition parties to identify and fill gaps at polling stations. They seek to recruit a record number of volunteers by election day to ensure that each station has an independent election monitor, and they are using apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to reach new volunteers. Combined, Oy ve Otesi and Turkiye Gonulluleri appear to have more than 100,000 volunteers, and they say that they aim to double that number by election day. These monitors will be present at the polling stations to witness and record the vote tally when the polls close at 5 p.m. local time, and the ballot committee will count the votes in front of them. Each group has developed its own software to then quickly digitize and centralize the tallies that they record at each polling station on election night.

In the face of this mobilization, supporters of Erdogan and the AKP will have a hard time rigging the vote on May 14. For any given attempt at ballot stuffing or misbehavior at the polls, a volunteer will be there to push back and raise public awareness. Once the polls close, monitors will record and publish their vote tallies on social media, allowing the public to verify the government’s official results. Regime supporters may get away with some level of cheating, but it seems doubtful they can steal enough votes to change the results.

Ahead of the upcoming vote, Erdogan has stacked the odds heavily in his favor: Opposition campaigns barely get any media coverage, their campaign banners get  banned, their rallies get interrupted, and their politicians regularly face baseless criminal investigations. Elections in Turkey nonetheless remain highly competitive and consequential. Even on an unfair playing field, the AKP has barely won elections—and actually lost, in the case of the municipal elections in 2019.

Given Erdogan’s historic unpopularity, the opposition stands a very real chance of prevailing on May 14. Whatever lies ahead, Turkey’s vigilant citizens are determined to make this a fair election.