On May 6, Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) decided by a seven to four vote to annul and repeat Istanbul’s municipal election. The original election, on March 31, saw Ekrem Imamoğlu from the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), win the mayorship by a margin of 13,729 votes.

The re-do election will be held on June 23. The YSK’s decision was substantiated by the claim that some ballot box officials were not civil servants. Considering all the irregularities that take place every election in Turkey (none of which have been annulled), this is a laughable rationale. Moreover, Istanbul voters simultaneously cast votes in three other elections: for district, city council, and mukhtar elections. These votes were collected in the exact same envelopes, and cast in the exact same ballot boxes, as the mayoral votes. Yet those three other elections were not annulled. Finally, previous elections also had ballot box officials who weren’t civil servants.

Why then was only the mayoral election annulled and not the other ones? The YSK’s decision, in short, has no “technical” or “juridical” justification. It should be named for what it is: a civil coup attempt by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies.