Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is predicted to face his toughest re-election challenge yet t as votes head to the pools today. Amid growing concerns over voter security, opposition and non-governmental organisations are stepping up efforts to ensure a fair poll.
It's busy in the Istanbul office of the non-partisan election monitoring group Turkiye Gonulluleri.
"Now, in 81 cities, we are organizing the system in each voting area," explains Ayce Yucel, one of the group's coordinators.
"We have a Turkiye Gonulluleri person in each school. We need at least 200,000 people. At the moment, we haven't reached that point yet."
Yucel confidently predicts they will achieve their monitor target by election day.
The group trains monitors through telephone support, online videos, Zoom and face-to-face meetings. The monitors learn how to collect voting numbers at polling stations and to collate those figures to check the official results are accurate.
Like many of the volunteers, Damla, who only wanted to be identified by her first name, is a student and is determined that every vote should count.
"As a young person, I cannot live the way I want, I cannot live the way I desire, and that is why I want to protect my vote and ballot box as a duty here because there are many security gaps," she said.
Nationwide operation
Opinion polls indicate an increasingly tight presidential and parliamentary election.
The government says all steps have been taken to ensure a fair vote, with videos from the state election board promising every ballot will count.
Despite this, monitoring groups say there are still concerns about voter security.
In response, Turkiye Gonulluleri has recruited a team of lawyers who will also help monitor the vote.
Volunteers are also being sent to Turkey's earthquake-struck Hatay region.
"Those who remained here have concerns, saying, 'I wonder if our votes will be stolen. I wonder if there will be someone who will protect our votes'," explains Tamer Baglan, Turkiye Gonulluleri's provincial coordinator for Hatay.
"As volunteers, we are doing whatever we can to ensure that the election is held in a fair way. We currently have nearly 1,000 volunteers here. We've allocated them to voting stations," he added.
Mass arrests
But alarm bells are ringing in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish region in the south-east, where the state has a powerful presence after decades of fighting with separatists.
At a press conference last Thursday in Diyarbakir, Turkey's largest Kurdish-majority city, human rights groups condemned the arrests under anti-terror laws of over 200 people, including lawyers, journalists and members of civil society.
"When we look at the investigation files, we see that journalists are being investigated for their journalistic activities, lawyers for their professional activities, civil society organisations for their democratic actions and activities," declared Abdullah Zeytun, head of the Diyarbakir branch of the Human Rights Association.
"The timing of the arrests is meaningful because all these people are actively involved in observing the election process – [they are] people who'll identify and prevent voting violations that might occur during this process or will report on these violations," he said.
The government dismisses such concerns, insisting the judiciary is independent.
But Sorgul Aytek Avsar, the parliamentary candidate in Diyarbakir for the main pro-Kurdish Green Left Party, says that the arrests are fueling fears for election night.
"Pressure has increased so much that people don't care about fear anymore; as they say, the knife is to the bone," she said. "People came together in a few hours after the arrests, thousands of them came together and protested. They showed that they would not accept it.
"I think this showed that people strengthened their resolve for the election. I think it showed that people are really ready to protect their ballot boxes."
Memories of 2019 vote
Election monitor groups working with political parties played a crucial role in helping to ensure that votes were fairly counted in a hotly contested Istanbul mayoral election in 2019.
That poll resulted in Erdogan's party losing its decades-long domination of the city.
Ayce Yucel was part of those monitoring efforts and said that the memory of that success motivates her for the forthcoming polls.
"Instead of thinking everything is going to be bad, you have to go to your school or wherever you are voting and follow what people are doing. That's the main idea, actually," Yucel said.
As parties step up their campaigns, some observers say the role of election monitors could prove pivotal to the outcome of Sunday's polls.
