VOTE AND BEYOND FOUNDATION HAS PUBLISHED ITS PRELIMINARY EVALUATION REPORT

Through the six it took part in as a civil society organization, Vote and Beyond, contributed to the way citizens’ will is transferred to the box and elections are held in accordance with the legal framework in a transparent way in many ways and it shared its preliminary referendum evaluation report with the public.

April 19th, 2017, Istanbul -

Vote and beyond indicated that given its departure point as an NGO and its sole anchor as the Law on Key Provisions of Elections and Electoral Lists numbered 298 (“Law no. 298”) and related bylaws and decisions of Higher Election Council, the free and fair elections can only be ensured with a full adherence of all parties to this legal framework. The preliminary evaluation of Vote and Beyond about in relation to the Constitutional Referendum held on April, 16th Constitutional Referendum is as follows:

“Regardless of the nature of its intentions and potential implications on the election results, the Higher Election Council’s decision which deems the unstamped referendum as valid, is not in compliance with the Law no 298 – as defined above, the provisions of the related bylaw numbered 135; and has damaged the transparency and compliance with laws in an irreparable way. We would like to point out that this intervention in the process conflicts with the legal framework, the sole anchor of work and questions the substantial contribution of our election comparison analysis system (“T3”). Both the feedback we acquired through the referandum evaluation survey we have conducted with our volunteers and the complaints we received at the referendum call center also accentuate this aspect.”

Vote and Beyond emphasized that an assesment of the fairness and transparency of elections requires an evaluation beyond the election day including the entire campaign period leading up to the elections. Hence, the following criteria can also be seen as a guideline on adherence to the legal framework for the entire election process:

 An accurate application of the provisions of relevant election law and regulations  Transparency of campaign financing  Equal opportunities for the competing parties to communicate with the society and to access media outlets  A clear separation of public funds and private/political party funds and equidistant public institutions and public media to all parties  Freedom of expression and assembly  Accurate and transparent preparation of electoral lists  Transparency of vote counting and consolidation of polling station counts/tallies.

Accordingly, with the intention to contribute to the electoral process within the framework provided with the aforementioned criteria, the Vote and Beyond team and volunteers worked towards this goal with a great determination and produced the following data:

The Work of Vote and Beyond in Numbers

 Vote and Beyond referendum informative referandum dissemination communications reached about 3 million voters.  Approximately 90.000 people watched the election observation trainings which have been broadcasted online  As a result of Vote and Beyond’s calls encouraging to be members of polling stations and election observers, about 25 thousand of our volunteers performed in these duties through political parties.  Vote and Beyond generated a state of the art smart phone application called “T3 Send a Tally”, ensuring proper photographing and transmittion of polling station result sheets to the online tally confirmation system. Within four days, T3 app was downloaded 165.000 times and on the day of the referendum, 230.000 tally images from across 80 provinces were fed into the system by volunteers. As a result, the polling station tally pool which then was compared to official results was extended, thereby providing the input to political parties to support their objections to official results. This app also allowed the citizens to be a part of the election monitoring process, notwithstanding the fact whether those were members or volunteers of a political party.

Results of Vote and Beyond T3 Web Comparisons

The purpose of T3 Web Application is to ensure that the polling station result sheets are correctly reflected in official results and confirm Higher Election Council’s election software, named SECSIS. For this purpose, the tally images provided by volunteers via the mobile app, the 432.000 scanned tally images and counting sheets provided by political parties were compared with each other as well as with the official results. About 90.000 T3 Web Application volunteers from across the world verified scanned tally images, entered the data represented on them to the system converting image to numeric data, resulting over 3 million sheets (images) to be converted to actual data. The quantitative results of this analysis is as follows:

Of the 166.679 tallies produced across Turkey, 158.181 individual tallies were cross-checked via T3 Web Application.

1. Through T3 Mobile and Web applications, 94,9% of all polling station tallies were cross- checked across the country. Only in provinces Bayburt, Erzurum, Ağrı and Gümüşhane, the percentage of crosschecked tallies were below 40%. 2. The cross-checks at all levels yield to inconsistencies regarding the votes cast in 290 polling stations concerning 99.680 votes cast with a potential impact of 0,22 % of the valid votes

cast across the country. Nevertheless, a deeper comparison of polling station counting sheets and final tallies suggests that the shifted votes in question concern about 5 thousand votes with a potential of a 0,01% direct impact on the election results.

Vote and Beyond warned that this cross-check addresses the consistency of the result sheets produced in polling stations at the end of vote counts to the official results but not the irregularities that may have taken place during voting and vote counting in polling stations.

The NGO shared these data and results with ALL political parties within the official objection periods and will continue its analysis so as to provide data on the way these results relate to different polling stations and votes.

According to official results, the vote shares of the much debated polling boxes where 100 percent of the votes were cast for one of the two competing sides is as follows:

100 Percent “Yes” votes cast in 960 polling stations, yielding to 89.158 votes

100 Percent “No” votes cast in 173 polling stations, yielding to 6.739 votes

Polling stations which had more votes than the number on the registered voters sheet:

Higher Election Council had also added those on referendum duty to the voter registries of polling stations for the referendum held on April, 16th. Accordingly, except for special circumstances which rarely occur, only those registered in that particular political station could cast vote at that polling box. Nevertheless, Vote and Beyond analysis revealed that in 2.397 polling stations more votes that the registered voters had been cast.

Vote and Beyond indicated that only a detailed analysis of the each individual polling station registry can shed some light on the debates in the public. While no such analysis is performed yet, the data on these polling stations has been shared with public and given further inquiry by the voters, this analysis can be performed.

Number of polling stations where no data eligible for crosscheck could be acquired:

20.202 polling station result sheets and 3.746.637 votes cast in these locations could not be crosschecked due to lack of local presence of a political party or volunteer image data and these numbers could be crosschecked only with the official tallies, official counting sheets and official results, all provided by the Higher Election Council.

The results of Vote and Beyond Referendum Call Center:

In collaboration with the Turkish Bar Association, Vote and Beyond volunteer lawyers provided information regarding the election process to all electorate on the day of the election as of 7 am through an established call center. This call center, together with the queries taken via social media and e-mail messages, gave legal assistance in relation to approximately 2.000 inquiries. Most frequent complaints raised by voters in these inquiries in relation to aforementined Law no 298 and related bylaws are the following:

1. Polling Station Boards NOT stamping and thereby NOT validating the back sides of the voting ballots 2. Citizens having to use stamps that read “YES” instead of “CHOICE” to cast their votes 3. Voters casting their votes in the polling stations, which they were not registered to due to lack of proper ID checks by Polling Station Boards 4. Citizens not being allowed to observe the vote counting process at the polling stations they have voted (A clear violation of the “Open Counting” principle)

Informing that a more detailed full referendum report is under way, Vote and Beyond indicated that the 2017 Referendum process continues with the objections of individuals and political parties to the judiciary and emphasized that all shareholders should put in their efforts for the process to be completed in a transparent, democratic, and fair way as to satisfy all segments of the society.

In case of any questions, please refer to this note. [email protected]

Sincerely,

Oy ve Ötesi