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bne May 2017 Southeast Europe I 53
The OSCE issued a damning state-
ment on the referendum that argued voters were not provided with impartial information about key aspects of the con- stitutional reform, and that civil society organisations were not able to partici- pate. Moreover, it said the work of the electoral boards lacked transparency.
Meyersson’s blog is only a preliminary look at the voting patterns and he says it will be possibly months before academ- ics can work through the details as the votes are still being collated.
However, he warned as soon as the day of the vote that if trouble were to come, then it would come in the rural regions where there were few election observ- ers. The majority of the big cities, where there were plenty of election observ- ers, voted ‘No’, which meant it was the strong ‘Yes’ vote in the rural regions that carried the day.
“These Never-AKPers tend to be, with some exceptions of course, voters in
the predominantly Kurdish southeast- ern region of Turkey. And so, in these areas, there ought to have been a vote swing from those previously voting
for the [pro-Kurdish and left-leaning People's Democratic Party] HDP in past elections to a ‘Yes’ vote for the AKP gov- ernment’s proposed constitution (which the HDP has stringently opposed) in the current election,” Meyersson wrote.
The results means that the AKP may have gained as many as 450,000 votes according to the preliminary results in the southeast compared to November 2015, equivalent to roughly 10% of
the votes of the entire region, calcu- lates Meyersson. That represents a big swing in the southeast towards the AKP in a region where the government is fighting a low-level war with the Kurds and has bombed and destroyed several towns and villages. Moreover, Meyers- son estimates this large number of votes, amounting to approximately 1% of all the votes cast, came with a lower voter turnout, down by 150,000 in the region, according to his estimates.
These patterns are similar to the 2015 vote where the overall voting pattern
was as predicted based on previous elec- tions, except for the surprise defection of a large number of largely Kurdish voters in Kurdish areas to AKP. The ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) surprised observers by los- ing large numbers of votes to AKP. “The vote swing seems to be driven by voters in Kurdish provinces leaving the other main opposition party, the pro-Kurdish and left-leaning Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), for AKP,” Meyersson said in his report at the time.
Meyersson goes on to offer more statis- tics on vote swing dynamics that sug- gest “the largest pro-AKP swings appear to come from the least pro-AKP areas
in the region”. In doing so, he uses data that plots the logarithm of the change in the pro-AKP vote swing against the logarithm of the change of the number of AKP votes in the past election for both the southeastern districts and the rest of Turkey. Indeed, this data shows that some of the biggest swings towards AKP were in those areas that were worst damaged by the government assaults on predominately Kurdish regions in recent fighting.
“The voters in the strongholds of the HDP, where sympathies for the PKK and antipathy toward the Turkish state are among the highest in the country, have truly chosen a peculiar time to switch
to the AKP. What could possibly explain how such strongholds of the pro-Kurdish movement would have waited until 2017 to start voting for the AKP?” Meyersson adds.
Meyersson’s study is backed up by multiple videos on social media purport- edly showing election officials stamping blank ballots to validate them and other footage of ballot box stuffing in regional
Ballot-box-level distribution of AKP/ YES vote share
polling stations. This is accompanied by multiple reports of election procedural violations in polling stations across the country that were entirely under the control of AKP officials. Most important- ly, ballots that lacked an official stamp were retroactively approved, against
all best electoral practice. Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), has said it will challenge the results and demand a recount of up to 60% of votes due to alleged irregularities.
Find more Southeast Europe content at www.bne.eu/southeast-europe
Selected headlines from past month:
· Spoof candidate polls second ahead of Serbia's presidential election.
· Moldova's populist pro-Russian 'hand grenade'.
· Albania heads for political crisis as Democrats threaten election boycott.
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