Turkey’s election board rejects Erdogan’s AKP objection for dismissed Istanbul voters

Turkey’s high election board has rejected part of an effort by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party to have a re-run of elections in Istanbul. The appeal regarded voters who were dismissed by decrees from government jobs after an attempted coup in 2016, Anadolu reported. In a petition submitted to cancel and re-run the city elections that it lost three weeks ago, Erdogan’s AK Party cited thousands of ballots cast by people it said were ineligible to vote due to previous government decrees. Based on initial results and recounts, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) won the election in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, with a margin of some 13,000 votes. The new CHP mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, took office on Wednesday, despite a formal request submitted a day earlier by the AKP to annul and repeat the mayoral elections over what it said were irregularities. The high election board, the YSK, has not yet ruled on the appeal to annul and rerun the elections due to voting irregularities including faulty entering of voting data, Reuters said.