ANKARA - Anadolu Agency welcomes the May 14 elections with its report card, which is unreliable as a result of the disinformation it created by stopping the data flow in the 2018 General Elections and 2019 Local Elections.
There are only a few days left until May 14, when the Presidential and General Elections will be held. In these elections, no doubt, everyone keeps an eye on the Supreme Election Board (YSK) and Anadolu Agency (AA). Due to their past election practices, both YSK and Anadolu Agency greet the May 14 elections with their unreliable report cards.
‘CORRECT RESULTS WITH AA ARE NOT POSSIBLE’
Making evaluations about the role of AA in the elections, Revolutionary Workers' Unions Confederation (DISK) Press Business District Representative Turgut Dedeoğlu said: "Trust in Anadolu Agency has been lost due to its practices in the past elections. The election results should be made by independent journalists or independent companies. Unless this is done, we will always experience this hesitation. The importance of institutions such as YSK and AA having a fully independent structure emerges here. The more autonomous these institutions become, the more reliable the election results will be. It will not be possible for us to get the right results or achieve the right results with this YSK, AA, TRT and institutions that have become the bugle of the government.”
CALL AGAINST DISINFORMATION
Emphasizing that the way AA presents the data can be considered as manipulation, Dedeoğlu said: “They will do their best in undemocratic ways to win the election. It would surprise us that AA did not do such a thing. I do not believe that AA is an independent agency. If the difference in the second round of the Istanbul elections had been a thousand, not 800 thousand, the votes would probably have been manipulated. The bigger the difference, the harder it will be for them to manipulate, mislead. Against this, political parties, institutions related to election security and the public need to be vigilant and protect the ballot box. Disinformation is misleading the news, playing on the news. AA can do this, TRT can do it too. It surprises us that power mechanisms do not do this. For this, we need to protect the votes. The Kurdish provinces have a conscious public who owns the vote and knows who to vote for, but this awareness has not been sufficiently formed in the Turkiye. And of course, there are those who try not to go to the ballot box by saying, "I'm going to change it". One vote can change everything. We saw this in the Istanbul elections, we saw how the results changed in the second election. For this reason, it is useful to finish the election in the first round and to state the result.”
MA / Yüsra Batıhan