Over 3 million Turkish citizens worldwide are readying to head to the polls for Türkiye’s much-anticipated presidential and parliamentary elections.
Voting is starting tomorrow for 3.4 million Turks abroad in Türkiye’s presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for May 14 at home.
Turkish citizens can cast their votes 24 hours a day, including holidays, without needing to book an appointment, until May 9 at designated election bureaus and border gates on 156 points across 73 countries, the Supreme Election Council (YSK) said.
Some 3,416,098 Turks living abroad are eligible to vote, 277,646 of whom are first-time voters.
The YSK has placed 4,671 polling stations on border gates for these voters.
Ballot boxes are set up for the first time in countries like Belarus, Brazil, Estonia, Morocco, Montenegro, the Republic of Korea, Libya, Lithuania, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Portugal, Slovakia and Tanzania.
Germany, housing the most significant Turkish diaspora, also has the highest number of eligible voters at 1,501,152 this year, data from the YSK showed. Germany is followed by France and the Netherlands, where 397,086 and 286,753 voters live, respectively.
Due to their high number, Turks in Germany will be allowed to vote at 26 representative bureaus, while France has provided nine bureaus for voting.
Over in the United States, home to 134,246 eligible voters, nine representative bureaus are available.
Brazil ranks at the bottom of the list regarding the number of eligible Turkish voters, at just 581 people, preceded by Nigeria with 584 voters and Turkmenistan with 635 people.
In Austria, six bureaus will host voting stations, while three offices each are set up in Azerbaijan and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC).
Should the May 14 elections extend into a run-off, citizens in Türkiye will go to polls again on May 28, while citizens abroad will be allowed to vote between May 20-24.
Once overseas voting ends, ballots will be brought to Türkiye via diplomatic couriers and methods determined by the YSK under maximum security measures to be kept safe in the capital Ankara.
These boxes will be opened at 5 p.m. after voting ends on May 14 across Türkiye. Counting these votes will be done under the supervision of the Directorate of Foreign Provincial Election Council.
In the presidential election, votes cast overseas directly add to the total percentage the candidates garner in Türkiye.
In the parliamentary election, overseas votes are distributed proportionately to constituencies countrywide according to the number of voters and the ballots parties receive in each province.
Under the shadow of two devastating earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 people in Türkiye’s southeast on Feb. 6, a total of 64 million Turks, including 5 million first-timers, will be casting their votes on May 14 to elect the country’s 13th president and all 600 members of Parliament.
The presidential race is likely to be primarily between incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. However, two other candidates, one secularly nationalist and one far-right, compete for the top office.
Opinion polls conducted in Türkiye by the survey company Areda last week showed Erdoğan would win 51.4% and Kılıçdaroğlu would garner 41.8% of the vote.
In the case of a run-off, pollsters also overwhelmingly endorsed Erdoğan, marking some 53.5% for him and 46.5% for Kılıçdaroğlu.