Mismatches had no bearing on Turkey’s final election result: Vote and Beyond

ISTANBUL

AP photo

The independent election monitoring initiative Vote and Beyond has said the minor incompliances between its own reports and the official results of the Nov. 1 election had no bearing on the final outcome.

Vote and Beyond, a civil organization of around 60,000 volunteers, said in a written statement on Nov. 3 that the 10,000-vote discrepancy between the official results of the election and its own reports were ultimately inconsequential.

“We took part with more than 60,000 volunteers in the Nov. 1 election. We compared 195,606 reports compiled by Vote and Beyond volunteers and political parties with the announced results,” Vote and Beyond stated.

“We spotted a discrepancy of 10,000 out of the total 48,000,000 votes cast across Turkey,” it said, adding that this difference amounted to just 0.02 percent of the entire vote and noting that this level of difference was no greater than it was in the June 7 election.

Turkey held a snap parliamentary election on Nov. 1, only five months after the June 7 election, which could not create a single-party government and led to fruitless coalition negotiations. 

The picture changed on Nov. 1, bringing the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power by a surprisingly decisive margin and making it eligible to form a single-party government. 

The AKP secured more than 49 percent of the vote, guaranteeing 317 seats in the 550-member parliament. 

Vote and Beyond was established in December 2013, and describes itself as “a civil domestic election monitoring mechanism, a civic movement that uses its constitutional and legal rights to observe elections on election day.” 

Most of if its volunteers function at polling stations as independent observers trained in electoral law. The organization’s headquarters conduct cross tabulation to check the official results by collecting the ballot box protocols and comparing them at provincial and ballot box level, making sure that the transition from the ballot box protocol to the government software is conducted correctly.