The narrowing margin between Indonesia’s two presidential candidates ahead of today’s election has heightened concerns about the possibility of ballot fraud, with the camp of Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo, long the front-runner in the race, fearing that it will bear the brunt of such fraud.
In the most recent case, Joko’s team has claimed a plot to prevent his supporters from casting their ballots in several polling stations overseas, including Hong Kong, where hundreds of Indonesian migrant workers staged a protest on Sunday after they were unable to vote because organizers had to close the polling station by
5 p.m.
“We’ve detected a scenario to make it difficult for people in areas known to be pro-Jokowi to exercise their right to vote,” Eva Kusuma Sundari, a member of the candidate’s team and politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, said on Monday. “These include Hong Kong, Malaysia and the United States,” she added.
Prior to that former Paramadina University rector Anies Baswedan, a spokesman for Joko’s campaign team, said the candidate had been subjected to a massive smear campaign, resulting in his popularity declining, according to most polls, and allowing rival Prabowo Subianto to catch up. “We know that there’s nine times as much smear campaigning against Jokowi than against Prabowo,” Anies said last week as quoted by Kompas.com.
Most surveys show that while Joko was long considered a shoe-in to win, holding a lead over Prabowo of as much as 30 points back in May, the former Army general has closed that gap rapidly.
The latest monthly survey from Roy Morgan, for instance, published last week, gave Joko 52 percent of the vote to Prabowo’s 48 percent. Other pollsters have Prabowo holding a slight lead over Joko.
Arif Wibowo, another official from Joko’s team, expressed disappointment with the Elections Supervisory Body, or Bawaslu, over what he called its slow response to complaints against the smear attacks.
“Bawaslu hasn’t followed up on many of our reports. We’ve submitted 18 to 20 reports [of alleged campaign violations], but to date there hasn’t been any attempt to follow up on them,” he said as quoted by Liputan6.com. “Bawaslu isn’t convincing enough in enforcing the law.”
Bawaslu chairman Muhammad, though, denied that Joko was the target of the bulk of the smear campaigns, saying his office had received around 50 complaints, with Prabowo’s team filing half of them.
“Most of the complaints concern insults against the candidates, or impolite statements,” he told the Jakarta Globe on Monday. He added Bawaslu had followed up on some of the reports by recommending follow-up action to the General Elections Commission, or KPU, and the police.
“We’ve decided against following up on the rest of the reports, though, because they don’t have enough elements [to be classified as campaign violations],” Muhammad said.
Exaggeration
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose Democratic Party last week endorsed Prabowo, played down the fraud concerns, saying Indonesia was “no longer in the New Order era,” when the regime of the strongman Suharto committed systematic campaign fraud during elections to secure his grip on power through the Golkar Party — which is also backing Prabowo, Suharto’s former son-in-law.
“Accusations that the government is not being neutral, that it is involved in [campaign] fraud, are an exaggeration,” he said in a recent interview posted to YouTube by his party. “The government consists of multiple parties, so which part of the government [is committed the alleged fraud]?”
Yudhoyono also played down the fact that five of the six parties in the current administration’s six-member coalition were backing Prabowo. (Only the National Awakening Party, or PKB, is in Joko’s camp.)
He insinuated that Joko’s party, the PDI-P, and its chairwoman, Megawati Soekarnoputri, were the ones stoking widespread concern about the alleged fraud.
Relations between Megawati and Yudhoyono have been famously icy since the latter, who served in Megawati’s cabinet, ran against her in the 2004 election and won.
The PDI-P has repeatedly raised allegations of campaign and ballot fraud by Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party since then, including in the 2009 election.
“I’ve heard and observed that the politicians making the electoral fraud allegations are always the same people,” Yudhoyono said. “I’ve often spoken with my friends; maybe these people who are so easily throwing around accusations of election fraud and of government involvement in cheating have done the same [cheating in elections], so they think others do it too,” he said.
Mahfud M.D., the highly regarded former chief justice of the Constitutional Court and Prabowo’s campaign manager, also wrote off the fraud allegations as groundless. “Some people intentionally try to incite emotions and some others are attempting to divide us,” he said on Monday. “For example, they’ve raised issues of fraud in the organizing of the voting overseas and the upcoming vote inside the country. They’re playing with the issues to divide the nation.”
Aleksius Jemadu, the dean of the School of Government and Global Affairs at Pelita Harapan University, said it was an over the top to accuse Bawaslu of negligence in its handling of campaign fraud complaints. “The public needs to keep the faith in the KPU and Bawaslu, rather than throwing around exaggerated accusations,” he said.
He agreed, though, that Joko’s camp in particular had good reason to feel concerned about possible violations. “Seeing the recent evidence, especially the way the overseas ballot was organized, there seems to be an indication that the state hasn’t acted in a neutral manner,” Aleksius said.
He also criticized Yudhoyono, saying his statement downplaying the fraud claims was unwise and that he should have known better as the president. “He gets carried away with his personal interests and partisan stance, but he should have avoided that and should have acted according to the Constitution,” Aleksius said. “He should have acted as a statesman, assuring people that the state will stay neutral in the election, that this will be an honest, fair and peaceful election.”
Aleksius warned that conflicts could easily arise if either of the candidates won by a razor-thin margin, as predicted by the polls.
He called on the people of Indonesia to trust in the Constitutional Court should any disputes about the results be brought before it, despite the recent hemorrhaging of trust in the institution since the arrest, trial and conviction of its former chief justice, Akil Mochtar, on corruption charges linked to the resolution of regional election disputes.
The Jakarta Anti-Corruption Court last week declared Akil guilty and sentenced him to life in prison, the first time it has ever handed down such a sentence.
“The head of state must guarantee the neutrality of all state institutions. And the public must trust and accept whatever verdict is handed down by the Constitutional Court,” Aleksius said.
Taking precautions
Muhammad, meanwhile, said Bawaslu would do its best to prevent violations during balloting and the subsequent vote count. “We’ve prepared for quite some time now the ‘One Million Volunteers Movement,’ in which we will assign two volunteers to each poll station across the country to ensure a fair electoral process,” he said. “Students and youths recruited for the movement must stay neutral and must not come from either camp.”
Police, too, have said they would assign at least one officer to each polling station, and instructed the officers to record the tally at each of the stations in order to prevent any irregularities in the vote count at the subdistrict level and higher.
“All the officers [assigned to poll stations] are obliged to record the result of the voting at each of the polling stations, including by taking a photograph of the tabulated result,” Jakarta Police Chief Insp. Gen. Dwi Priyatno said on Monday. “So the officers must coordinate with election officers at polling stations.”
The candidate who wins today’s vote will become Indonesia’s seventh head of state and will be sworn in on Oct. 20 for a five-year term. They will have just two weeks after taking office to announce their cabinet
Author/Autor: Erwida Maulia
Source/Fuente:http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/specter-fraud-overshadows-indonesian...
