Abstract
With a majority of ‘Yes’ votes in the Constitutional Referendum of 2017, Turkey continued its drift towards an autocracy. By the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred practically all executive power to president Erdoğan. However, the referendum was confronted with a substantial number of allegations of electoral misconducts and irregularities, ranging from state coercion of ‘No’ supporters to the controversial validity of unstamped ballots. Here we report the results of an election forensic analysis of recent Turkish elections to clarify to what extent it is plausible that these voting irregularities were present and able to influence the outcome of the referendum. We apply statistical forensics tests to identify the specific nature of the alleged electoral malpractices. In particular, we test whether the data contains fingerprints for ballot stuffing (submission of multiple ballots per person during the vote) and voter rigging (coercion and intimidation of voters). Additionally, we perform tests to identify numerical anomalies in the election results. For the 2017 Constitutional Referendum we find systematic and highly significant statistical support for the presence of both ballot stuffing and voter rigging. In 11% of stations we find signs for ballot stuffing with a standard deviation (uncertainty of ballot stuffing probability) of 2.7% (4 sigma event). Removing such ballot-stuffing-characteristic anomalies from the data would tip the overall balance from ‘No’ to a majority of ‘Yes’ votes. The 2017 election was followed by early elections in 2018 to directly vote for a new president who would now be head of state and government. We find statistical irregularities in the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections similar in size and direction to those in 2017. These findings validate that our results unveil systematic and potentially even fraudulent biases that require further attention in order to combat electoral malpractices.
Highlights
In 1996, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, -mayor of Istanbul, remarked that democracy can be compared with a bus ride, “once I reach my stop, I get off” [1]
We reported the results of an election forensic analysis of the Turkish constitutional referendum in 2017 and the general elections in 2018
While we find no consistent evidence for result fabrication, for ballot stuffing and voter rigging we do find systematic and statistically significant indications in the 2017 and 2018 data
Summary
In 1996, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, -mayor of Istanbul, remarked that democracy can be compared with a bus ride, “once I reach my stop, I get off” [1]. It seems that he arrived at one of these stops on April 16, 2017, when Turkish people went to the polls to vote on a constitutional reform package that among others would replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with a presidential one. There were further reports on unverified (i.e., unstamped) ballots being cast, state coercion of ‘No’ supporters, and election observers being kept from polling places [2]. Though cursory evidence for statistical anomalies in results from 2014 has already been reported [6], until now it was not at all clear to which extent such alleged malpractices systematically affected Turkish elections [7, 8]
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