The Turkish opposition requests to monitor the work of the Election Commission
A delegation of observers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe arrived in Türkiye on May 12, to monitor the transparency of the general elections, which are expected to be a test of the stability of the super powered presidential system built by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, head of the Republican People’s Party, announced that the opposition would publish in parallel the voting protocols on May 14.
CHP leader expressed concern that the authorized bodies, including the Supreme Council of Elections and the Turkish news agency Anadolu, which traditionally monitor the counting, may not deliberately publish all protocols.
The concern is due in part to attempts by the Turkish Ministry of Interior to activate its own system for monitoring election results.
For this reason, the Ministry approached the Central Election Commission with a request for comprehensive information on polling stations, including the number of voters and ballot box numbers.
The Interior ministry plan provoked a strong reaction from the opposition, as, according to national law, law enforcement agencies have no right to interfere in the work of polling stations except in the event of security problems.
It became known that the Supreme Council for Elections refused, on the eve of that, to provide information to the Turkish Ministry of Interior.
The counting of votes in Turkish elections is always supervised by committees of representatives of the participating parties who are present at all polling stations.
Thus, supporters of Kılıçdaroğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) are traditionally present at every polling point or at most of them.
A separate danger, experts say, is the psychological atmosphere on polling day.
In 2014, state-run news agencies began reporting results confirming the Justice Party’s victory too early, prompting frustrated opposition observers to leave polling stations prematurely, before they had access to vote-counting protocols.
