disabilities who have physical and visual impairments as well as those who are illiterate are unable to check their voter registration status. There is no disaggregated data available concerning the number of voters with disabilities, their literacy status, whether they speak Turkish or not, types of disabilities, as well as the province, district, village in which they reside in or whether they need personalized support or not. The YSK Chairman announced, in his statement before 2018 General Elections, that the total number of voters is 58,391,328 and the number of voters with disabilities is 664,326.11 According to this statement, the ratio of voters with disabilities to the total number of voters is approximately 1.2%. This rate is much lower than it should be according to the general ratio of persons with disabilities in the population. As such, this shows that the main problem is the lack of data on voters with disabilities. Informative documents and ballots produced by the YSK for elections are also not accessible to various disability groups. Similarly, the majority of the centers are allocated for voting are not accessible. There are many voters with disabilities who cannot use these centers because they cannot access the ballot boxes to vote. Prior to each election, the YSK and the Ministry of Family officials always announce to the public that they have taken all the measures regarding voters with disabilities, however access to ballot boxes still remains as the greatest problem. Two voters with disabilities, who could not vote in the 2011 General Elections and in the 2015 General Elections due to the accessibility issues of ballot boxes have won their lawsuit against YSK. In both cases, the YSK representatives had argued that this incident was an exception, but the court rejected YSK’s argument and awarded compensatory damages to be paid by the YSK. According to AMER’s November 1, 2015 General Election Monitoring Report, out of 375 polling stations, only 43.2% had a ramp for persons with physical disabilities to enter the building, and only 7.2% had an elevator.12 Very few of these stations both had a ramp and an elevator. 11 https://www.haberturk.com/ysk-secmen-sayisini-acikladi-1965633 AMER, 2016, “1 Kasım 2015 Milletvekili Genel Seçimi Gözlem Raporu” (“November 1, 2015, General Election Monitoring Report”), online at: https://bit.ly/2ULS9ae, p. 21 12 20