Creativity is at work to fend off the impact of a recent law that complicated voting rules for Sunday's election and which Kurds believe aims to take advantage of the region's high illiteracy rate to hamper their vote.

Zeynel Bagir, a party activist, placed a stencil over a ballot paper containing a long list of names. A circle revealed the name of a Kurdish candidate -- the only place left for an illiterate voter to put the stamp.

"We will print about 100,000 stencils and distribute them to the people," Bagir said. "Our volunteers will teach them how to use it."

Another option the Democratic Society Party (DTP) is considering is to provide their voters with strings of specific length. When stretched from the left of the ballot paper, the string will lead to the box where the stamp should go, Bagir explained.

Fourty-five percent of women and 19 percent of men in the mainly Kurdish southeast are illiterate -- well above the national average of 20 and four percent, respectively.

The DTP, which enjoys a strong support in the region, has fielded 60 candidates to run as independents in a bid to circumvent a 10-percent national threshold required for parties to enter parliament.

The threshold has blocked pro-Kurdish parties from entering parliament, even though Kurds have become lawmakers on other parties' tickets.

As soon as the DTP announced its new election strategy in May, the outgoing parliament, in a rare show of unity, responded with a legal amendment that raised a new barrier.

The names of independents now figure on the same ballot paper as all the parties running, resulting in a long and complicated ballot paper that would confuse illiterate voters. Earlier, independent candidates had separate voting slips, which voters simply put into envelopes.

"The fact that we were forced to stand as independents is in itself a manifestation of undemocratic practice," said Selahattin Demirtas, one of about 20 to 30 Kurds expected to make it into the 550-seat parliament.

His woes do not end there: Demirtas cannot address his electorate in Kurdish because Turkish is the only legal language of the election campaign.

"It is so hard to have a real dialogue with the people. Sometimes I feel I fail to get my message through," he said as he toured impoverished villages near Diyarbakir.

The 34-year-old lawyer still greets the villagers in Kurdish before switching to Turkish for his speech.

But the questions come in Kurdish: one man asks Demirtas whether he would help the jobless relatives of a local party activist if elected. One woman complains that their only source of water is the fountain on the village square.

Demirtas answers patiently -- in Turkish.

To compensate where his message may fail, a Kurdish-speaking imam steps in.

He tells villagers to support the Kurdish candidates and not the ruling, Islamist-rooted Justice and Development (AKP) party, which is equally popular in the largely conservative southeast.

"In real Islam, all people are equal, but that's not how the AKP acts," the Muslim cleric says. "They use religion to manipulate the pure feelings of the Kurdish people."

Demirtas's visit ends with Kurdish folk dances as music blares from the loudspeaker of his van. The villagers see him off with victory signs and waving banners of red, yellow and green, the traditional Kurdish colours.

"The law does not prohibit the use of Kurdish music in election campaigns," Demirtas says, adding: "I will continue to at least greet the people in Kurdish."