Supreme Election Council Chair: No Imaginary, Duplicate Voters

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Supreme Election Council (YSK) Chair Sadi Güven has made a statement regarding the "imaginary voters" claims ahead of the local elections which will be held on March 31.

Saying, "Just as there are no duplicate voters, there are no fake and imaginary voters," Güven has made the following remarks in his statement:

*Before the [parliamentary] elections on June 24, 2018, voter registrations of 736 people were suspended because of not residing in dwellings where they were previously registered. For this election period, 56,495 voters' registrations were suspended.

*As of today, the number of voters in Turkey is 57,093,985.

*It is not possible that a citizen of the Republic of Turkey to be registered twice in the system. Just as there are no duplicate voters, there are no fake and imaginary voters.

Voters older than 100

Regarding the claims that voters who are older than 100, sometimes up to 165 years old, were detected in the voter lists, Güven has said:

"When we saw six thousand people who are older than 100 in voter lists, we got the suspicious records examined.

"Those who are dead among the six thousand people were deleted from the records. But after January 1, we got 165 similar complaints.

"It was determined that seven of these people are alive, the rest are dead. Apart from those seven people, the names were dropped from the lists.

"We do not think this is enough. One week before the elections, we will retake the list of dead citizens and drop their names from voter lists.

"Hence there are no dead voters in the system as of now. Until one week before the elections, we will drop the people who die." (EKN/VK)