Turkish opposition parties are mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers to verify that numbers recorded at polling stations are faithfully entered into the government’s Elector Record System (SEÇSİS). Will it be enough? |
Abdullah Bozkurt, a columnist for Today’s Zaman, has a long analysis, “Hacking democracy in Turkey,” about how the AKP might steal the Turkish election on Sunday.
Bozkurt starts out by positing that the only way for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to achieve the 276 seats needed to form a government without coalition partners is “to steal the election in plain sight on November 1 and crush the ensuing uprising with brute force,” much like Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i did in Iran in June 2009.
But Turkey is different from Iran,
given the strong public awareness of the significance of vote counting among opposition parties, media and advocacy groups. Furthermore, the international observers’ missions by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), whose blessings give a legitimacy to elections, serve as a deterrent to possible fraud activity en masse.
It’s much easier for Erdoğan to sideline the parliament and formal government afterwards than to rig the vote.
This will be all the more difficult because, he expects, the AKP will likely have the state-run Anadolu news agency report bogus results, making the fraud hard to trace. Only the private Cihan news agency, with its network, resources, and manpower, can pull the data and relay it to the opposition parties and media. Accordingly, he figures, Cihan will be targeted by “Erdoğan’s thugs if they decide to rig the elections.”
What if the AKP does manipulate the election results and is found out? Bozkurt expects that an “anger that has been boiling for some time in Turkish society against Erdoğan and his party will erupt like a volcano ... which will prompt Erdoğan ... to order a massive crackdown on protests,” hoping that by crushing opposition rallies that “the opposition will give up the fight over time.” Not only that, but they will round up politicians, human rights defenders, journalists and activists. What then? This is where things get really nasty:
Neither the military nor the police force will risk confronting such a tsunami and definitely won’t side with Erdoğan against the people. The president knows this as well. And perhaps that is why he has been grooming paramilitary forces, such as the Ottoman Hearths, attached to the AKP’s youth branches. Radical Islamist groups who have been trained and have fought in Syria under the political cover and logistical support of Turkey’s Islamist rulers may come in handy when confronting Erdoğan’s foes.
Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum.
