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Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018

With a majority of ‘Yes’ votes in the Constitutional Referendum of 2017, Turkey continued its drift towards an autocracy. By the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred practically all executive power to president Erdoğan. However, the referendum was confronted with a substantial num...

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Autores principales: Klimek, Peter, Jiménez, Raúl, Hidalgo, Manuel, Hinteregger, Abraham, Thurner, Stefan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6173410/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30289899
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204975
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author Klimek, Peter
Jiménez, Raúl
Hidalgo, Manuel
Hinteregger, Abraham
Thurner, Stefan
author_facet Klimek, Peter
Jiménez, Raúl
Hidalgo, Manuel
Hinteregger, Abraham
Thurner, Stefan
author_sort Klimek, Peter
collection PubMed
description With a majority of ‘Yes’ votes in the Constitutional Referendum of 2017, Turkey continued its drift towards an autocracy. By the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred practically all executive power to president Erdoğan. However, the referendum was confronted with a substantial number of allegations of electoral misconducts and irregularities, ranging from state coercion of ‘No’ supporters to the controversial validity of unstamped ballots. Here we report the results of an election forensic analysis of recent Turkish elections to clarify to what extent it is plausible that these voting irregularities were present and able to influence the outcome of the referendum. We apply statistical forensics tests to identify the specific nature of the alleged electoral malpractices. In particular, we test whether the data contains fingerprints for ballot stuffing (submission of multiple ballots per person during the vote) and voter rigging (coercion and intimidation of voters). Additionally, we perform tests to identify numerical anomalies in the election results. For the 2017 Constitutional Referendum we find systematic and highly significant statistical support for the presence of both ballot stuffing and voter rigging. In 11% of stations we find signs for ballot stuffing with a standard deviation (uncertainty of ballot stuffing probability) of 2.7% (4 sigma event). Removing such ballot-stuffing-characteristic anomalies from the data would tip the overall balance from ‘No’ to a majority of ‘Yes’ votes. The 2017 election was followed by early elections in 2018 to directly vote for a new president who would now be head of state and government. We find statistical irregularities in the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections similar in size and direction to those in 2017. These findings validate that our results unveil systematic and potentially even fraudulent biases that require further attention in order to combat electoral malpractices.
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spelling pubmed-61734102018-10-19 Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018 Klimek, Peter Jiménez, Raúl Hidalgo, Manuel Hinteregger, Abraham Thurner, Stefan PLoS One Research Article With a majority of ‘Yes’ votes in the Constitutional Referendum of 2017, Turkey continued its drift towards an autocracy. By the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred practically all executive power to president Erdoğan. However, the referendum was confronted with a substantial number of allegations of electoral misconducts and irregularities, ranging from state coercion of ‘No’ supporters to the controversial validity of unstamped ballots. Here we report the results of an election forensic analysis of recent Turkish elections to clarify to what extent it is plausible that these voting irregularities were present and able to influence the outcome of the referendum. We apply statistical forensics tests to identify the specific nature of the alleged electoral malpractices. In particular, we test whether the data contains fingerprints for ballot stuffing (submission of multiple ballots per person during the vote) and voter rigging (coercion and intimidation of voters). Additionally, we perform tests to identify numerical anomalies in the election results. For the 2017 Constitutional Referendum we find systematic and highly significant statistical support for the presence of both ballot stuffing and voter rigging. In 11% of stations we find signs for ballot stuffing with a standard deviation (uncertainty of ballot stuffing probability) of 2.7% (4 sigma event). Removing such ballot-stuffing-characteristic anomalies from the data would tip the overall balance from ‘No’ to a majority of ‘Yes’ votes. The 2017 election was followed by early elections in 2018 to directly vote for a new president who would now be head of state and government. We find statistical irregularities in the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections similar in size and direction to those in 2017. These findings validate that our results unveil systematic and potentially even fraudulent biases that require further attention in order to combat electoral malpractices. Public Library of Science 2018-10-05 /pmc/articles/PMC6173410/ /pubmed/30289899 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204975 Text en © 2018 Klimek et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Klimek, Peter
Jiménez, Raúl
Hidalgo, Manuel
Hinteregger, Abraham
Thurner, Stefan
Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018
title Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018
title_full Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018
title_fullStr Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018
title_full_unstemmed Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018
title_short Forensic analysis of Turkish elections in 2017–2018
title_sort forensic analysis of turkish elections in 2017–2018
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6173410/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30289899
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204975
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