The Turkish government could consider using troops as voters to influence the election results on 14 May, Mezopotamya news reported.
According to Hikmet Demir, a census registrar, the government moved 11 thousand troops to the Kurdish-populated Şırnak (Şirnex) in 2019 and temporarily registered them as voters for local elections.
The election results in Şırnak in 2019 surprised many in Turkey, as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the province’s mayoral seat by receiving 61.7 percent of the votes, while the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) votes remained at 35 percent.
According to Demir’s report, the governor and the police head of the province registered the troops in place of 11,000 citizens that had moved out of seven neighbourhoods in the province razored by the Turkish military during security operations in 2016.
The HDP gained no result from numerous complaints it lodged to the country’s Supreme Election Board.
Some 32,259 voters were registered in Şırnak for the elections in June 2018. However, the number of officially registered voters increased to almost 40 thousand less than a year later in March 2019 local polls.
The Turkish media at the time published photos of people carried in Şırnak by armoured vehicles to the polling stations to cast their votes, as well as images of soldiers and police officers voting in huge groups. In all those ballot boxes where the photos were taken, the AKP received almost 100 percent of the votes.
Following the elections, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appointed Mehmet Aktaş, the then governor of Şırnak, as the head of the national police. The president also awarded Aktaş by giving him a seat in the executive board of the state’s postal services.
After Aktaş left Şırnak, Demir in a letter addressed to the new governor explained the details of the election fraud, also accusing an MP of the AKP and the party’s provincial head of taking part in the plan to win elections in the Kurdish-populated province.
As Turkey heads to critical elections on 14 May, the residents in Şırnak is wary that the AKP is planning to use the same method once again, Özgür Politika reported.
