As Turkey’s momentous May 14 elections approach, securing the integrity of the vote is a top concern. Turkish civil society will play a crucial role in safeguarding against fraud and ensuring a transparent process by mobilizing thousands of election monitors. 

In a new Video Q&A, “Safeguarding Turkey’s May Elections, POMED’s Merve Tahiroğlu talks with Ertim Orkun of Oy Ve Ötesi, Turkey’s most prominent election monitoring NGO, about the organization’s plans and expectations for May 14.

“We have quite an experience as a team. We know what to do and how to do it,” Orkun explained to POMED. “We are enough to statistically define if there is an anomaly [in election results]. And we can assure that [election] day is going as it should.” 

Watch the discussion here.

 


Transcript

The below transcript has been very lightly edited for clarity.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Hello I’m Merve Tahiroğlu, the Turkey Program Director at the Project on Middle East Democracy, or POMED.

Turkey is set to hold nationwide elections on Sunday, May 14, to elect its next parliament and president. The outcome of this election could be pivotal for Turkey’s future. Should the opposition unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it promises to turn Turkey back to a path of democratization. Should Erdoğan and his ruling party win again, Turkey’s government could grow even more repressive.

Opinion polls so far indicate that it will indeed be a very tight race. So as voting day approaches, one of the key questions on everyone’s mind is how to secure the integrity of the elections and how to safeguard against potential electoral fraud. Turkish civil society will of course play a very important role in this by organizing civil election monitoring to take place on May 14.

So to discuss these election monitoring efforts, I’m here today with Mr. Ertim Orkun, the president of the board of directors at Oy Ve Ötesi, or in English Vote and Beyond, which is Turkey’s oldest civil society organization that focuses specifically on election monitoring. Since its founding in 2013, Oy Ve Ötesi has trained and mobilized thousands of Turkish citizens, including myself, to act as civil election monitors in the country’s nationwide elections, and it will no doubt play a key role in the struggle for election integrity on May 14 as well.

So Ertim bey, thank you so much for joining me today.

Ertim Orkun
Thank you. Pleasure being here.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Before we get into the specifics of what you do and what you expect to happen on May 14, can I start with a more general question? What is the significance of these upcoming elections for Turkey? We in Turkey often discuss it as a pretty historic election. Would you say that these elections are more important than the last round of general elections in 2018?

Ertim Orkun
Not—not really. We keep saying that this is “the” election, the coming election, for the last couple of elections. But honestly, it’s a part of the polarization going on. And we don’t want to push the country to that side. As an NGO, we keep saying, okay, we have elections, we will keep having elections no matter who wins or what happens.

Yes, it’s a decision-making election where we will have to discuss the future of the country, and there is a very important part to choose for everybody. But the message behind saying that this is the most important election is pushing the country a bit far, [to] a place where we don’t want to. Because, we want to be skeptical, but not anxious. I mean, there’s a thin line between skepticism and anxiety, and we want to make sure that the country stays on the right side. So we need to be skeptical, we need to be questioning what could happen that day, what can we do, what can we push more.

On the other hand, if we push people on the side of anxiety, then the result is a disaster, because everybody keeps asking nonsense questions to each other for years and years, which doesn’t lead to a healthy public opinion.

So, yes, the elections are important, it will be very important. The country will make a decision. There has been a ruling party which ruled the country for 20+ years. Will it be the same or will it be a change in the country? So this is a big decision to make, of course, for the country. But we are neutral, we are waiting for the results as everyone else. So our main focus point is the safety of the elections. So we will keep working on that [in] the best way we can.

Merve Tahiroğlu
I absolutely understand. I think just because it’s such a tight race this time it feels very high stakes for everyone watching these elections this time around. But I completely understand what you mean with polarization.

So regarding this question of election security. Of course, that’s the most important thing. Your organization has been engaging in these efforts to try to get volunteer citizens mobilized to do election monitoring. And I wanted to ask you, why is election monitoring so important in Turkey? I mean, what role have civil election monitors played in recent years, such as those organized by your organization?

Ertim Orkun
Yep, our first election was in 2014. In Istanbul, we were mobilized as a bunch of friends. Honestly, we were curious about what’s happening during the elections. But then we became an NGO, and we were specialized in this election-monitoring business. And we’ve been doing it since. We’ve had eight elections so far, and this is going to be the ninth. And we have quite an experience, I can say, as a team, as people, and we know what to do and how to do it during the elections. We’ve learned much with our previous experiences.

What we do—may I just go into that? What we do is, just, we open up to everybody and say, okay, come on and volunteer, and we gather people across the country, everywhere, in every city—we try to reach every city. And we organize these volunteers to be there during election day. In Turkey, it’s a bit different from the United States. We only have one day, the people have to go and vote that day. It’s always a Sunday. So during that Sunday, life stops, everybody has to go and vote, from eight o’clock to five pm it’s voting time, so it’s just voting that day.

We organize people to be there at the ballot boxes, to watch and observe what’s going on that day. We train them before the day. We give them a harsh training. We train them for three and a half hours. It’s a long training that explains what’s going to happen that day, and how they should react to any possible situation. We have various different cases that can happen that day. We try to explain to them what will happen case by case. We try to show them how they should [react]—the legal point of view and also the psychological point of view, because you have to be calm, not to be part of the polarized, two sides there are.

They want to win the day and this polarization is increasing the tension within the room. We’re trying to prepare our volunteers to be the calm people within the room, trying to get to the result, which is: what people voted should be counted, and published safely and securely.

We had 45,000 volunteers in 2018. And our target is to reach 100,000 people this election. We, we believe we will reach that. We had, up until now, we have a little more than 30,000 people, who have volunteered. But as the elections come, the people–the motivation increases because people start hearing about the elections more and more on the news, all over the media and everywhere. So we expect to reach 100,000 people at the end or even exceed that number.

There are approximately 200,000 ballot boxes, which means we’re not enough with 100,000, but we are enough to statistically define if there is an anomaly within the country or not, at least. We are an NGO, we are not the government or a political party. But we can assure that the day is going well, as it should, with 100,000 people.

Merve Tahiroğlu
That sounds like a high target but knowing from past elections I feel like you will be able to reach it. So, I mean, you said that these monitors, you train them to be there on Election Day and record any kind of anomalies. What kinds of anomalies could take place? What are you training these people to actually look out for?

Ertim Orkun
Yep. There are actually 5-10 different cases that happen during all the elections.

One of them, for example, is: I want to vote for my wife instead. A guy comes in and says, “Okay, she doesn’t know how to vote, I will vote for her instead.” This is, of course, illegal. Everybody should vote for themselves. And everybody should be in the [booth] on their own, to decide with their conscience of their own and vote anonymously. Nobody should see who they vote for. So we have such cases.

[For another example,] there’s a [disabled] person, or the mother, or the father, or the person who wants to help comes and says, “Okay, I want to be there with him or her, trying to aid.” But the aid isn’t how to just vote. You can just let him be there and then leave him alone to vote for himself, for example.

In the most difficult cases, in rural areas, there are groups that vote all together. We want to stop, to make sure that this is not a group event but it’s a personal event, that people one by one have to decide on their own and make their own decisions. So these are typical anomalies we face during the day [that] we try to stop.

The thing is, the people that form the ballot box board are from that area, so they say, “Okay, yeah, I know this guy, so okay, I should say yes.” It’s illegal, but they feel sympathy and they say, okay, I could let this happen. And everyone from the board sometimes says yes. We are the ones telling them that this shouldn’t happen because it’s against the law. It should happen according to the legal legislation. And we try to make sure that it happens according to the legislation. So that’s our job for the day.

And at the end of the day, we’re there to count with everybody. We see—in the Turkish elections, it’s a piece of paper, you have to stamp the party—everybody sees each and every one of the votes. We see the votes, we try to be there, see one by one, count one by one. And then, at the end of the counting, they prepare a piece of paper, which is signed by everybody within the room. It says that it’s a declaration, that they declare that this is what we counted. And they say, “Okay, I signed it.” We take a picture of this piece of paper and then [enumerate] the data and then see if the announced data from the government is actually the data that we’ve seen on the field with our own eyes. That’s what we do.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Yeah, so you keep your own records of the votes counting.

Ertim Orkun
Yes.

Merve Tahiroğlu
And then you match that data to what comes out later on.

Ertim Orkun
Exactly.

Merve Tahiroğlu
How do you share these pictures that you take? Or is there a system, a technology that you use to centralize all these documents from different ballot boxes?

Ertim Orkun
Yes, we have an application that gathers all these pictures. We’re now preparing a new one. I’m not 100% sure if it’s going to be an application or a web app or web-based system. The IT people are now going to finalize their decisions any minute. But the system is ready. When the new system will allow us to digitalize the data with an [Optical Character Recognition] (OCR) technology, when we take the picture, the data that’s handwritten will be automatically digitalized with the computer program.

So we will have real time digital data coming from everywhere across the country. And all these data are gathered in one of our servers where we are going to share it with the parties, with the political parties, and after some time with the public, the people, we will open it up at a point.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Yeah, and all of these ballot boxes or rooms where the voting takes place, they have government-appointed people there who are responsible for making sure that everybody votes, and who comes in, and to do the actual counting. There will be monitors, civil monitors such as the people you organize. Do you also expect there to be political parties to organize their own supporters to be in those rooms?

Ertim Orkun
Yes.

Merve Tahiroğlu
What is the composition of these rooms, for example, when the vote counting actually takes place?

Ertim Orkun
Every ballot box has a board of people and the government finds at least two people for each and every ballot box. They’re supposed to be neutral. They’re usually teachers from the schools [where] we go [to] vote. And then, other than these, we have–every political party announces a person to be within the room. Five of the top parties have a right to assign a person to be within the room. They are a part of the ballot box board.

So they form up a seven-people board, where they decide what to do that day. We are observers. Observers are not part of the board, but they are within the room, they’re just observing what’s going on. They don’t have a right to object or oppose anything happening that day. Of course, it’s not black and white, we are people, they do have a right to say, Okay, it’s not going perfectly well. This is what we should do. This is what the law says. That’s what we do. But we don’t have a right to object to anything the board decides.

Merve Tahiroğlu
But you can publicize, I guess, your observations—

Ertim Orkun
Yes, of course.

Merve Tahiroğlu
—on social media and other channels, with political parties.

Ertim Orkun
Yes.

Merve Tahiroğlu
So you said there will be about 200,000 ballot boxes. I believe some of these are outside of the country. So in the country, it’s a little bit less, fewer?

Ertim Orkun
Yes, yes. We–all the ballot boxes from abroad, from the United States, Europe, or any country, they close the ballot boxes one week before the elections start in Turkey. They don’t count it over there. They just put it in a big bag and tie it up, make sure that it’s not open, and then bring it to Turkey, to Ankara, and they count it at the end of the day, as all the ballot boxes are being counted. So they are counted here in Ankara. But the people will be voting—I think the voting will start in 10 days—and then we’ll have a week or 10 days, depending on the country, to vote for the people living outside Turkey. The Turkish citizens will have 10 days to vote there.

The reason is, in Turkey, the system is organized so that I go to the school across the street. It’s quite easy for everybody because there are schools everywhere and people just walk 500 meters to the school [where] they have to vote.

But that’s not the case in the United States or in any European city. There are a couple of voting points, where people have to travel there to vote. So it takes time. So that’s the case in other countries. That’s why we have longer days for those people to work.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Yeah. And you said you vote at the nearest possible place to your home. And that’s true for all of your volunteers. So if you would like to have volunteers, for example, in a place like Gaziantep in a neighborhood, do you have to have volunteers who are from that particular neighborhood in order to be able to do election observing there? Or do you have people travel throughout election day, after they cast their own ballots, for example?

Ertim Orkun
We have people traveling a lot because our volunteers usually come from areas, specific areas where we have high volunteers. And we ask them to be there at 7am in the morning to start the observation. The important thing is that they observe the beginning of the day, because that’s the preparation period. There’s a one hour preparation period: they open up the ballot boxes, they prepare the papers, etc. So we want to make sure that we observe what’s going on in the beginning and then in the end. So we ask our volunteers to be there.

We gather these people, we try to say, Okay, do you have a car? We ask. Can you drive people to close towns, to other places, and would you like to do so? If they say yes, we organize these people to go to the other locations in the morning, and then they come back to their own poll positions, they vote for themselves, have lunch, and then come back and then observe the rest of the day. That’s usually how our volunteers work. We don’t want them to travel too far away because it’s dangerous. We turn around people within the same city, let’s say, not too far away. But, of course, we need to have volunteers in the eastern part of Turkey as well as the western part. We have a lot of volunteers in the west, in Istanbul, in Izmir, or in Ankara, in big cities. We don’t have as much in Hakkari or Van. We want to make sure that we also are able, should be able, to observe what’s going on within those rooms. We try to have connections with parties, political parties, ask their aid, ask if they share data within the day. Sometimes they do. We also use those data. We also use their observers as our observers from time to time. Yeah, so you have fewer people for the East.

Merve Tahiroğlu
That was actually going to be my next question. I assume you’re prioritizing, of course, every voting district equally. But there, in past elections, based on some of the reporting that came out of it, we know that there have been fewer civil monitors, election monitors, generally in the eastern part of the country. And one of the things that’s concerning now is that the HDP, which has a stronghold in this part of the country, is no longer running in this election as a political party itself. Will that impact the HDP’s ability to appoint observers there? Are you concerned about ballot boxes in the eastern parts of the country going unchecked by non-government-appointed, independent observers?

Ertim Orkun
The HDP situation is a bit difficult right now because they’ve decided not to run for the elections because of the case that’s going on. So they’re going to be in with a new party, and the new party is not allowed to be a part of the ballot boxes. So yes, they won’t have a seat.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Because it’s not big enough, right? It’s not allowed because it’s not in the top five biggest [parties].

Ertim Orkun
Yes, yes, yes, yes, that’s the case. But they will have observers within the room, they will have people within the room that’s observing the day. It’s a bit more difficult for them to observe and be a part of the system, but still, they will, I think, be able to manage the security of the day within the room.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Are you thinking about trying to get in touch with the parties that are stronger in these regions to try to get maybe their members or supporters to sign up with Oy ve Ötesi and carry out election observing through your organization?

Ertim Orkun
Yes, we ask them to join, to be part of the system. Because the data we gather is for the political parties. We don’t do it for our own, I mean, it’s for them. We share it with everybody, we share it with all the parties. And we’re going to be fast, faster than anybody has ever been. If we have the pictures of each and every ballot box result paper at seven o’clock, we will have the results at seven o’clock. That’s how fast we will be. So we’re asking the political parties to be a part of the system, just join and share the data, use our system, use the data we have. I hope they will be a part of the system.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Yeah, absolutely.

I have one final question for you. I really hate to ask this question towards the end, but I have to ask because, observing Turkey in the recent elections, it is a concern. You do a lot of training, of course, for all of the people who are volunteering for you, signing up for you. Are you preparing them at all for a scenario whereby there could be violence during the voting process? I think in one of the, at some of the past elections, there have been some gunfire, gun fights that have come up.

Ertim Orkun
Yep.

Merve Tahiroğlu
An election observer was shot in one of these skirmishes. Are you worried about this scenario? What are you telling your volunteers to do in such an event?

Ertim Orkun
We’re always worried about this scenario, of course, because we are organizing 100,000 people, and the safety of these people…. It’s not our job, of course, it’s the police’s job, but it’s still…. We are the ones organizing them so we are afraid of anything happening to them. Yes, we give them the message: Never be involved. That’s the message. We are not there to fight. We’re not there to fight for anybody. We’re just there [as] observers. Be the calm person there. Be the calm, neutral person there. Okay, you have a choice of your own, you do vote for somebody. But that’s not the case here. What we’re doing here is just to observe what’s going on and be a part of this. If you are a partisan person, just go and be with the party, not with us. We keep saying this, to make sure that they are secure and safe. If they’re not a part of a fight, then they won’t be harmed. That’s the reason that we are saying this. So we did have incidents in the past. Not as bad as shootings, but we did have incidents. But not as bad, as I said. We hope nothing happens.

Merve Tahiroğlu
Yes, I hope so too. It’s good to know that you’re prepared for it. I think this is all the time that we have and these are all my main questions. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I have previously volunteered as an election observer with Oy ve Ötesi and it makes me feel much more confident that the election will have a high—higher—degree of security and integrity on May 14 thanks to organizations like Oy ve Ötesi and great people like you. You’re doing a very important service for all of Turkey and Turkish democracy.

Ertim Orkun
Thank you.

Merve Tahiroğlu
So thank you very much.

Ertim Orkun
Thank you very much.

 

Ertim Orkun is the president of the board of directors at Oy Ve Ötesi. Follow him on Twitter @ertim_orkun

Merve Tahiroğlu is the director of POMED’s Turkey Program. Find her on Twitter @MerveTahiroglu.