After waiting for several months the Supreme Election Board (YSK) declared just a few weeks before the upcoming local elections that in order to vote one has to make sure that they have their citizenship number included on their national ID cards. As this number system was launched very recently, there are more than 3.5 million voters who have not replaced their ID cards with the ones that have the numbers on them. As a result, as you might have seen in the pages of this very newspaper, people who did not want to lose their right to vote queued in massive numbers in front of official buildings to replace their ID cards. This is a picture that students of democracy in Turkey, as well as enemies of democracy, have to analyze. This should also be part of young military officers' curriculum. Parliament changed the law on voting procedures in 2008 so that instead of dyeing voters' fingers (which was quite unfortunate) after they voted to prevent repeat voting, citizenship ID numbers would be checked by election officials against a national database to make sure that the voters were not registered to vote in several different places. Everyone can reach this database on the Internet and if one enters a few ID details, one can get the ID number on the screen even if it is not written on the national ID card. That is why the new law reads, "Voters shall present either their national ID cards or any other official document with the citizenship number on it to election officials." The court reads this to mean that the national ID card also has to have the number on it, whereas the wording does not necessarily mean that and the lawmakers have clearly stated that this is not what they meant when making the law. Moreover, as I said above, if the officials enter the ID details into the computer, they can easily get the number if they want. But the YSK refused to change its interpretation and thus hundreds of thousands of people spent many hours in queues in order to prevent their voting rights from being annihilated by the bureaucratic oligarchy.
One can only speculate why the bureaucratic oligarchy was so late in announcing such a decision, leaving people with almost no time to change their ID cards. But the prime minister has stressed that the citizens should not be trapped. Some members of the oligarchy have mistakenly asserted that only uneducated people and residents of rural areas vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). So it is possible that they wanted to prevent those potential AK Party voters who were presumably late in changing their ID cards because they are uneducated or live in rural areas. The oligarchy's presumptuousness and their belittling portrayal of AK Party voters as belly-scratching and empty-headed idiots, of course, is in almost direct contradiction with sociopolitical reality in Turkey. The AK Party's main rivals, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP), also get substantial support from rural and underprivileged areas. That is why these parties also objected to the court's decision, as well.
My aim is not to decipher the intentions of the bureaucratic oligarchy. The reason for the decision could simply be a paucity of Turkish language skills and the reason for the fatal delay in announcing their decision could be another sign of their inefficiency. The point that has to be underlined is that those people in the queues seem to be from all walks of life -- young, old, urban, rural, headscarved, "secularist-looking" and so on -- and these people enthusiastically defend their right to vote. Given that if one does not vote in Turkey, there is no penalty in practice, it is clear that these people appreciate the value of their votes even it is only a local election. That is one of the reasons that, while participation in local elections is only about 35 percent in the UK, in Turkey it is always more than 80 percent.
Coup-lovers have to analyze both these queue images and this overall picture.
