ACADEMICS, lawyers, trade unionists and human rights activists from Britain have reported witnessing widespread election fraud in Turkey last weekend as the public cast their parliamentary and presidential votes.

The delegation visited the country’s mostly Kurdish-majority southeast for two weeks ahead of Sunday’s election, which saw the ruling Islamic-right AKP government lose seats but secure a parliamentary lead through its alliance with the nationalist MHP and other far-right parties.

The fate of the country’s president was left unclear after current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was unable to secure majority votes but just a few points ahead of central candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

Citizens in Britain and across the world will be voting in the run-off election from this weekend.

Reporting back from their visit, the British delegation said they witnessed an escalation of political arrests by the government and widespread police and military repression of peaceful protests, public gatherings and election canvassing.

“We have been shown proof that election fraud by the Turkish authorities took place when the election results approved by local election committees were typed into the national database,” they said in a statement.

“The local campaigners gave us direct evidence of two cases — approved local election committee documents and the published final result, we have reason to believe this is a much more widespread issue.”

One example was how the local election committee document in the Diyarbakir district of Bismil shows 233 votes for the Green Left Party (YSP), while the final result reported shows 0 for YSP and 233 for the MHP.

Similarly, in the district of Hakkari, the local election committee document shows 228 for YSP and 0 for MHP, while the officially published result shows 228 for MHP and 0 for YSP.