Turkey's election board rejects objection for decree-dismissed voters
Turkey’s high election board has rejected part of an effort
by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party to have a re-run of elections
in Istanbul, dismissing an appeal regarding voters who were dismissed by
decrees from government jobs after an attempted coup in 2016, state news agency
Anadolu said.
In a petition submitted to cancel and re-run the city
elections that it lost three weeks ago, Erdogan’s AK Party cited thousands of
ballots cast by people it said were ineligible to vote due to previous
government decrees.
Based on initial results and a series of recounts, the main
opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) won the mayoralty in Istanbul,
Turkey’s largest city, with a margin of some 13,000 votes.
The new CHP mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, took office on Wednesday,
despite a formal request submitted a day earlier by the AK Party (AKP) to annul
and repeat the mayoral elections over what it said were irregularities.
The high election board, the YSK, has not yet ruled on the
appeal to annul and rerun the elections due to voting irregularities including
faulty entering of voting data, a wider issue that has been described by AKP as
organized fraud.
The YSK also ruled to investigate the status of 41,132
voters, including people who according to the AKP were dead, ineligible or
voted twice, and to look into some ballot box council attendants.