Türkiye’de Seçim Bütünlüğü ve Seçim Gözlemi

Abstract

The political polarization, populist discourses and development of risk society inside the global contexthave been causing damages on electoral integrity and legitimacy. Domestic election monitoring is anecessity in order to establish a fair, secure and transparent election process. In Turkey, there is onedomestic monitoring organization, Vote and Beyond and a few non-governmental organizations tryingto observe elections. Elections in Turkey have not been analyzed around the concept of electoralintegrity and citizens are not aware of domestic monitoring. The aim of this paper is to present theconcept of electoral integrity and underline the importance of domestic monitoring, especially inpolitically divided societies. Our two key questions for this article are: “how can domestic monitoringorganizations help to establish electoral integrity and legitimacy in Turkey?”, “what are the ideas ofvolunteers at Vote and Beyond on electoral integrity in Turkey?” According to these questions, thisarticle aims to analyze the activities of Vote and Beyond aiming to develop electoral knowledge ofTurkish people and legitimacy of the elections in Turkey and the impact of volunteers working withinthis NGO. Our analysis will be based on in-depth interviews with the founders and a pilot study of asurvey realized with volunteers of Vote and Beyond. The first argument relies on the idea that socialand political polarization and the development of global risks by populist and post-truth politicshave negative impacts on electoral integrity. And the second argument is that election malpracticesencourage more and more citizens to participate in election observation in order to prevent fraudand corruption during the elections. Within this approach, the article aims to make a theoretical andempirical contribution to electoral studies in Turkey.