With both presidential candidates claiming victory in Wednesday’s election based on quick counts, and the deciding official results only expected on July 22, both camps have assigned officials and volunteers to keep a close eye on the vote-counting process from the ward level up.
Muhaimin Iskandar, the chairman of the National Awakening Party, or PKB, one of those that endorsed Joko Widodo, reminded party members on Thursday that the fact that eight of 12 pollsters conducting a quick count had called the election for Joko should not lull them into a sense of contentment.
“The very crucial stage of the process has only just begun,” he said. “We call on all our members to report every finding of violations or fraud [in the counting process] to local election supervisory committees and police in their respective regions.”
Muhaimin made the call just a day after an estimated 72 percent of Indonesia’s 190 million eligible voters went to polling stations nationwide to cast their vote. Two-thirds of the quick counts conducted after voting put Joko ahead of rival Prabowo Subianto by five to seven percentage points.
Four pollsters, however, called the vote for Prabowo, by a narrower margin of around one to three percentage points.
The differing sets of quick counts prompted both candidates to declare victory on Wednesday.
Prabowo’s former commander in the military, Wiranto, who now chairs the People’s Conscience Party, or Hanura, said he had also ordered his party faithful to carefully monitor the ongoing vote count.
“We discussed [activities] to safeguard the tally from the ward level all the way to the central level,” Wiranto, whose party is part of Joko’s coalition, said after a meeting with the candidate’s running mate, Jusuf Kalla, as reported by Vivanews.co.id.
“Some regions need intensive safeguarding,” he added, although he declined to elaborate.
Hasto Kristiyanto, a spokesman for Joko’s campaign team, said they had assigned officials and volunteers to gather copies of the C1 form, the piece of paper summarizing the vote count from each polling station.
It also includes the number of eligible voters registered at each polling station and the number of invalid ballots cast.
Because the final vote count is heavily dependent on the figures presented in the C1 forms, observers say any attempt to rig the outcome would have to include manipulating the forms.
Fadli Zon, a deputy chairman of Prabowo’s Great Indonesia Movement Party, or Gerindra, said Prabowo’s campaign team had set up a special unit responsible for collecting the tallies based on copies of the C1 forms collected by its observers at polling stations across the country.
“We have a data tabulation center that accumulates the counts from observers spread across Indonesia, based on the C1 forms,” Fadli said.
He added his camp was preparing to publish the collated data to counter the pollsters who called the election for Joko.
“A team from the PKS [Prosperous Justice Party] is preparing for that,” Fadli said as quoted by Vivanews.co.id, referring to one of three Islamic parties in the coalition. “Our plan is to update the real-count data regularly.”
The official process
Officials from the government bodies in charge of the real vote count — the General Elections Commission, or KPU, and the Elections Supervisory Body, or Bawaslu — met in Jakarta on Thursday to discuss measures to ensure there was no manipulation of the ongoing tally.
Bawaslu chairman Muhammad identified the count at the ward and subdistrict levels as being “the most prone” to violations, although he added that Bawaslu had anticipated that by assigning teams to polling stations, comprising “impartial” volunteers to do the task under the “One Million Volunteers Movement” program that it rolled out earlier this year.
“It’s most prone at these levels because [the election] is organized by ad hoc officials, thus there’s a fairly large potential for intervention by individuals,” Muhammad told reporters after Thursday’s meeting.
“That is not to say there is no indication for potential fraud at the district/municipal and provincial level. We’re therefore doing more than just technical safeguarding,” he added.
After votes are counted at each polling station, the ballots are sent to the respective ward office where they are counted again and checked against the figures given on the C1 forms. The ballots and forms are then collected at the subdistrict level where the process is repeated, and again at the district/municipal level and then the provincial level.
In the final stage, the provincial tallies are sent to the KPU headquarters in Jakarta for the national recap. Bawaslu has assigned officials and volunteers to monitor each stage of the vote count.
The whole process takes two weeks, with the KPU expected to announce the final results of the election by July 22.
KPU chairman Husni Kamil Manik said some provinces were more vulnerable to violations and disputes than others, including West and East Java, North Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara, among others. Some constituencies in these provinces have had to schedule a re-vote because there were not enough ballots to go around during the election on Wednesday.
He added that the KPU and Bawaslu had agreed to resolve all disputes at the lowest level of the count so that it would not amplify.
Police, KPK participation
The police have also been deployed to safeguard the counting process, says National Police Chief Gen. Sutarman, starting from polling stations all the way to the recap at the national level.
“We’ve secured the polling stations and made our own records of the counts at the stations, although we weren’t able to cover all 478,000 polling stations with our 254,000 officers,” Sutarman said.
The Corruption Eradication Commission, or KPK, also said it was keeping a close eye on the process, especially given the potential for bribery of elections officials to doctor the vote count.
“We’re calling on organizers and participants of the presidential election against playing with the fate of hundreds of millions of people. The KPK is not asleep,” KPK spokesman Johan Budi said on Thursday. “If any member of the public knows or obtains information of a possible conspiracy between election participants and the KPU, the KPK will look into it.”
Additional reporting by Markus Junianto Sihaloho, Rizky Amelia & Yeremia Sukoyo
Source/Fuente:http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/eyes-kpu-vote-count-gets-way/
