The head of Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Board (YSK) said on Thursday that Turkey will sooner or later have electronic voting.
Speaking to pro-government daily Hurriyet, Ahmet Yener said:
“We might start electonic voting by the next elections or by the one after the next, and we might get started abroad, where there are far less voters. Turkey will sooner or later have electronic voting.”
Noting that a project for planning a transition to electronic voting was launched back in 2014 but discontinued, he said they would likely start making assessments after the local elections in March 2024 about the infrastructure requirements and whether they would first have a pilot scheme in the next elections or a full scale transition in the one after the next.
“We will meet with party representatives in the Turkish Grand National Assembly to discuss issues that need to be addressed by a new legislation,” he added. “If we can have the new legislation in place, this will pave the way for a transition to electronic voting. It might happen in 2028, or later, but it will inevitably happen.”
Commenting on Yener’s remarks, the YSK representative of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Mehmet Rustu Tiryaki said that a transition to electronic voting was possible but that did not mean that the system would automatically be a secure one.
“Venezuela, for instance, has electronic voting, but there are doubts about its safety,” he said. “Countries like South Korea and Estonia have it as well, and no concern has been expressed about the system’s safety in these two countries. The cases differ from one country to another.”
Burcu Akcaru, the nationalist Good Party’s deputy chair in charge of ballot security, stressed that the public should be convinced about the safety of the system.
“We may certainly have the system after questions [on safety] have been answered,” she said. “It should be guaranteed that there will be absolutely no outside interference in the election results.”
Source: Gerçek News
