Leader in Istanbul mayor's race worries about vote manipulation in recount
A recount in the Istanbul mayor's race has seen opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu's lead fall from 23,000 to 21,500 over Binali Yildirim of the ruling Justice and Development Party; Imamoglu and others fear the electoral council might tamper with the results.
ANKARA, Turkey — The candidate who came in first in the initial results of the Istanbul municipal elections has appealed to electoral authorities to confirm him as the city’s mayor, warning that the extended recount, now in its third day, could lead to unrest.
Ekrem Imamoglu, the candidate of the opposition alliance, was ahead of the ruling party’s Binali Yildirim by 23,000 votes in Sunday’s election when the Supreme Electoral Council announced that all ballots had been counted on Tuesday morning. The result dealt a severe blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he is a former mayor of Istanbul and had campaigned heavily in what is the biggest city in Turkey.
Yildirim promptly applied to the electoral council for a recount, pointing out that the number of invalidated votes, 319,000, was more than 10 times the winning margin.
But Imamoglu said the invalidated votes were normal for a total vote of 8.9 million, and that in the previous local election there had been more than 400,000 invalidated votes.
