A judge, Murat Aydın, has stated that unsealed ballots cannot be accepted as valid at any case, adding that there is no legal basis for any automatic validation for such ballots as Turkey is heading to the presidential and parliamentary elections on June 24.
Former Vice President of the Union of Judges and Prosecutors (YARSAV), which was shut down by the AKP government with a state of emergency decree, Aydın has announced via social media that the public opinion regarding the validation of the unsealed ballots is not true.
The parliament passed a new law on pre-election alliances and electoral regulations on March 13, 2018. The law package was accepted with the majority votes of lawmakers from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which entitles the Supreme Election Council (YSK) to accept unsealed ballots as valid.
This law article has particularly led to criticism since it overtly paves the way for illegitimacy for the upcoming elections considering that the YSK controversially decided to regard unsealed ballots valid just as the votes were counted at the fraudulent April 2017 constitutional referendum that culminated in the voting in favour of the presidential system.
Referring to an existing law article, however, Aydın says that all the electoral committees should count and seal the ballots, officially documenting them just before the voting starts early in the morning.
"In other words, there is no change in the use of ballot boxes that are sealed by electoral committees," he says, adding that voting procedures should start after all the ballots are sealed by the officials.
Aydın argues that the unsealed ballots should be regarded as invalid according to the existing law articles even if the electoral committees neglect to seal the ballots just before the voting.
He underlines that electoral regulations are carried out in order to protect the votes of all parties and independent candidates, thus ensuring the reflection of the national will into the ballot boxes and electoral results.
The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) had launched a countrywide petition campaign against electoral frauds and irregularities and called on the people to defend the right to vote earlier in April just before President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called for snap elections which should have been held in 2019. The TKP calls on the people to get organized against electoral frauds of the ruling AKP party.
