The headquarters of Turkey's main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) became a major nerve center on the evening of June 24 after voters went to the polls to elect the country’s first executive president and a new parliament. As a precaution against voting fraud, the CHP had set up its own election coordination platform in cooperation with other opposition parties. Hundreds of IT specialists and other volunteers were on duty at the party’s election center to operate an alternative counting system for the vote. They were supposed to receive counts from ballot box overseers across the country, enter them into a computerized system and crosscheck the results announced by the Higher Electoral Board (YSK) and the government-controlled Anadolu news agency, which the CHP had accused of planning results manipulation for months.

After the polls closed at 5 p.m., hundreds of CHP supporters flocked to the party’s headquarters in anticipation of the count. As the crowd waited excitedly in the yard, party officials and journalists gathered in front of giant screens inside the building. Then something unexpected happened: The figures that hit the screens were not the results of the alternative counting system, but a TV broadcast of Anadolu's numbers.

The initial results put President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead by a large margin in the presidential race. CHP officials spoke immediately to the media, claiming that their figures and those of Anadolu did not match. Soon, they announced that the presidential contest was headed to a runoff, meaning they expected Erdogan to finish at less than 50%, but offered no data to support their claim. In a third and final statement to the media an hour later, the CHP officials backpedaled, accepting Anadolu's figures without even waiting for the YSK’s official statement.

What happened to the alternative count that the party had hyped ahead of the elections? It turns out the system collapsed as soon as the count started, or more precisely, never began to work.