Turkey: Election platform apologizes for late coverage

By Baris Gundogan

ANKARA

A platform of Turkish NGOs and political parties apologized to voters Wednesday for posting belated results from this week’s landmark elections.

In a written statement, the Fair Election Platform said it had assigned around 415,000 balloting committee members and 295,000 observers before Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

Though the platform had declared beforehand they would share instant election results with Turkey, the statement added: “When voting ended, we experienced serious problems until 9 p.m. [1800GMT] in our system -- where we were going to broadcast election results directly from the ballot boxes -- due to integration problems” over data flow to report results.

Thus, said the group, they were unable to share election results as planned.

Problems in uploading election records

The statement added that there were also brief problems in uploading the election result records.

“In this context, we sincerely apologize for not accomplishing our commitment in time to announce election results and not being able to meet the expectations of voters in this manner,” it said.

The platform includes the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Good (IYI) Party, and the Felicity (Saadet) Party -- which together form the opposition Nation Alliance -- as well as the Democratic Party (DP) and the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).

NGOs such as the Kemalist Thought Association, Unity for Democracy, and Right and Justice Platform are also included in the platform.

- Remarks on results by main opposition spokesman

On election night, Bulent Tezcan, spokesman for the main opposition CHP, claimed that the poll data from the national Anadolu Agency should not be trusted.

“Don’t believe in Anadolu Agency. According to the real results, the [presidential] elections will go to a second round,” he claimed.

In fact, with 99.9 percent of votes counted, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the presidential poll in round one, with 52.5 percent of the vote, while his closest rival Muharrem Ince got 30.6 percent, eliminating the need for a second round.

- Anadolu Agency's elections coverage

Anadolu Agency successfully reported the election results, with its performance praised by officials from several media outlets in Turkey.

It monitored voting across the country in real time and broke accurate news to its 2,250 subscribers all over the world in 13 languages.

Bora Bayraktar, CNN Turk's general manager, was also among those who thanked Anadolu Agency for its “unproblematic” election coverage.

Rebuffing claims that Anadolu Agency manipulated the results as alleged by some, Bayraktar said: “Numbers can shift in elections held all over the world. I don’t think there was a situation [during the elections] as exaggerated.”