Turkey’s top election body announces official results for Istanbul elections, says İmamoğlu winner

ANKARA

Turkey’s Supreme Election Board (YSK) on June 24 announced the official results for the Istanbul election re-run, declaring main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu as the victor of the June 23 poll with 54 percent of the vote.

“The renewed Istanbul elections are finalized. İmamoğlu received 54.21 percent of the votes,” said YSK chair Sadi Güven.

Güven also said that ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate Binali Yıldırım received 44.99 percent of the votes.

The number of voters eligible to vote amounted to over 10 million, Güven added.

“Some 8,925,063 electors voted. The number of invalid votes are 178,599,” he said.

Meanwhile, the votes of the other two candidates from Felicity (Saadet) Party and Patriotic (Vatan) Party combined could not surpass 2 percent.

Güven also conveyed that parties can appeal to the top election body by June 25, where the district election board’s ruling on the appeals will be finalized until June 27.

The provincial election board will have two days to respond to the district’s decision, and during the following three days appeals can be submitted, Güven said.

“I would like for this election to be beneficial to our country,” he said.

İmamoğlu narrowly won office as mayor of Turkey’s largest city on March 31 with 13,000 votes, having received 48.8 percent of the votes, while Yıldırım got 48.55 percent, according to official figures from the YSK.

İmamoğlu served for 18 days before his certificate of election was revoked. Turkey’s electoral board annulled the results on grounds that there were polling clerks who were not civil servants after the AKP claimed there were corruption and irregularities in the vote-counting process.

The CHP headed for a comfortable and historic victory on June 23 in a re-run of Istanbul’s mayoral election, having a lead of nearly 800,000 votes.