Turkish electoral authorities on Wednesday began recounting votes from Istanbul districts after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AKP objected to results that saw an opposition candidate narrowly win a weekend local election.
The AKP won most votes nationwide in Sunday's municipal ballot, but results also showed the party lost the capital Ankara and the country's economic hub Istanbul in one of its worst setbacks in a decade and a half in power.
AKP officials on Tuesday filed a challenge with the High Election Board (YSK) saying they had found irregularities in ballots in Ankara and Istanbul.
"The district branches of the electoral board in Istanbul decided to recount the ballots in eight districts after the appeals yesterday," the Board chief Sadi Guven told reporters.
He said some of the district branches had already started rechecking ballots, most of which were votes that had been rejected as invalid.
AKP officials had said there was a huge discrepancy between ballots cast at polling stations and data sent to election authorities.
Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, was a key election prize for Erdogan and he presented former premier and loyalist Binali Yildirim to run as the party candidate for mayor.
Erdogan, himself a former Istanbul mayor, had campaigned hard in the city. But the ruling party was stung by the economy with Turkey in recession for the first time in a decade and inflation in double digits.
Istanbul was a tight race and both Yildirim and the opposition CHP candidate Ekrem Imamoglu declared victory when tallies showed them in a dead heat.
The YSK on Monday said Imamoglu was ahead by 28,000 votes with nearly all ballot boxes tallied, prompting AKP officials to challenge the result.
"The world is watching us, watching the results of our city's election," Imamoglu told reporters on Wednesday, asking that he be handed his mandate as soon as possible.
He said that while there could be minor errors in vote counts the outcome will not change.
Imamoglu called on Erdogan and his nationalist ally to stop a slip into "worrisome atmospheres" and to work with him to improve the economy and ensure a return to "normality."
