  Concerns about the integrity of Turkey's elections have increased with the
recent transition from a parliamentary democracy to an executive presidency
under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Election forensics tools are used to identify
statistical traces of certain types of electoral fraud, providing important
information about the integrity and validity of democratic elections. Such
analyses of the 2017 and 2018 Turkish elections revealed that malpractices such
as ballot stuffing or voter manipulation may indeed have played a significant
role in determining the election results. Here, we apply election forensic
statistical tests for ballot stuffing and voter manipulation to the results of
the 2023 presidential election in Turkey. We find that both rounds of the 2023
presidential election exhibit similar statistical irregularities to those
observed in the 2018 presidential election, however the magnitude of these
distortions has decreased. We estimate that 2.4% (SD 1.9%) and 1.9% (SD 1.7%)
of electoral units may have been affected by ballot stuffing practices in
favour of Erdogan in the first and second rounds, respectively, compared to
8.5% (SD 3.9%) in 2018. Areas with smaller polling stations and fewer ballot
boxes had significantly inflated votes and turnout, again, in favor of Erdogan.
Furthermore, electoral districts with two or fewer ballot boxes were more
likely to show large swings in vote shares in favour of Erdogan from the first
to the second round. Based on a statistical model, we estimate that these
swings translate into 342,000 excess votes (SD 4,900) or 0.64% for Erdogan. Our
results suggest that Turkish elections continue to be riddled with statistical
irregularities, that may be indicative of electoral fraud.
