February 26, 2024
JAKARTA – The General Elections Commission (KPU) has insisted on continuing with its vote tabulating platform despite strong resistance against its perceived shortcomings, which losing camps in the presidential race say are to blame for making the vote-tallying process prone to fraud.
The Sirekap application, a new addition to the general election, was initially offered by the KPU as a way for the public to monitor the tabulation process before the poll body announces the official winners by March 20 at the latest.
The application, however, courted controversy after people voiced complaints on social media about irregularities in vote count data on Sirekap, and the camps of presidential candidates Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo claimed to have found alleged inflated vote numbers for presumptive winner Prabowo Subianto.
This has led to accusations from both camps that Sirekap has been engineered to favor Prabowo, widely seen as President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s favored successor who ran alongside the President’s son Gibran Rakabuming Raka.
It also prompted the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) to recommend on Sunday the KPU to stop releasing vote tally on Sirekap to avoid more public disturbance.
Most recently, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which backed Ganjar, sent a letter to the KPU demanding that the poll agency stop the use of Sirekap and return strictly to manual means of vote tallying, and called for a forensic audit of the application.
But the KPU insisted on continuing with Sirekap, with commissioner Idham Holik saying, according to various news reports, that the application “can still be accessed by the public” and that the official results would still be based on the KPU’s manual tabulation, rather than the vote count displayed on Sirekap.
Idham confirmed to The Jakarta Post that his office had received the PDI-P letter and that the KPU would soon convene to address it.
“[Once there’s a date for the meeting], we will inform [the media],” he said.
Read also: PDI-P calls for audit of KPU vote-counting application
Aside from Sirekap, the PDI-P also took issue with the KPU’s decision to suspend on Sunday the vote tallying process at the district election committee (PPK) level.
The poll body previously said that the suspension was to allow improvements to be done on Sirekap, but the PDI-P said that the decision has instead opened more “opportunities for fraud”.
The Anies camp has also thrown its weight behind the PDI-P’s demands, with campaigner Iwan Tarigan saying on Wednesday that the camp “respected” and “agreed” with the PDI-P, Tribunnews.com reported.
Election dispute
Both the Anies and Ganjar camps are thought to be sharing information with each other in preparation to lodge cases with the Constitutional Court after the KPU announces the winners.
Read also: Prabowo’s rivals face uphill battle to open election fraud probe
The Ganjar camp has appointed senior lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis to head its legal team. While Anies’ campaign team lawyer Ari Yusuf Amir previously said that the team’s case would be built around two ethics breaches that happened in the Constitutional Court’s leadership and the KPU.
In response, the Prabowo-Gibran camp has looked to Crescent Moon Party (PBB) chair Yusril Ihza Mahendra to lead its defense.
Yusril has experience in handling election disputes, notably when he led Jokowi’s legal team in a 2019 dispute filed by losing candidate Prabowo.
Tough ask
While the jury is still out on whether either camp’s challenges will be successful, the court has never ruled in favor of a plaintiff challenging a presidential election result. In past cases, the court found the plaintiffs failed to prove that the elections were systematically rigged on a large scale.
The court recently began preparations to handle incoming disputes regarding last week’s presidential and legislative elections. These cases will be presided over by eight justices, including chief justice Suhartoyo.
Read also: Jokowi begins post-election maneuvering
Justice Anwar Usman is barred from all election dispute cases following his ethics violation when issuing a controversial ruling that effectively enabled his nephew Gibran to run for vice president.
Analysts also say Anies’ camp might be on shaky ground as Jokowi moves swiftly to pull opponents into his fold before stepping down, starting with hosting a Sunday dinner with Surya Paloh, the chair of NasDem Party, which leads the three-way alliance supporting Anies.
Analysts see the meeting as one of the earliest indications of political reconciliation after Prabowo-Gibran’s presumptive victory.
Jokowi on Wednesday welcomed Democratic Party chair Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono as the newest member of his outgoing administration, which experts say is another post-election maneuver aimed at consolidating power in his final months in office that will provide the next government with a smooth transition.
Once positioning themselves as an opposition party, the Democrats joined the Prabowo-Gibran camp after pulling their support for Anies.