Turkey’s united opposition said it had found irregularities in thousands of ballot boxes used in Sunday’s first-round presidential election, but conceded that this was not why their candidate Kemal K?l??daro?lu lost out to President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an.

K?l??daro?lu’s Republican People’s party (CHP) said on Wednesday that it had filed a complaint with Turkey’s election board over the results from 2,269 of the 201,807 ballot boxes in the presidential race. Erdo?an won the contest by almost 5 percentage points to put himself in pole position for the May 28 run-off vote.

Muharrem Erkek, CHP deputy chair for legal and election affairs, told a press conference in Ankara that even if its objections, which related to about 1 per cent of ballot boxes, “doesn’t change the general results, we follow every single vote.”