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 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.

The July 9 presidential election is set for an extremely tight race, as a recent poll indicated on Wednesday that only a 3 percent gap remained between presidential hopefuls Prabowo Subianto and Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

A joint survey by the Washington-based International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI), which is affiliated with noted pollster Saiful Mujani, found that Prabowo had continued to gain in popularity.

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Young voters in the age group of 17 to 22 years prefer the Joko Widodo-Jusuf Kalla pair to the Prabowo Subianto-Hatta Rajasa duo for the presidential election scheduled on July 9, according to Polcomm.

Based on its recent survey involving 1.2 thousand respondents from 33 provinces in the country, 6.4 percent of the total of 46.4 percent of the Jokowi-JK pairs supporters were young voters while the rest were aged between 23 and 43 years, Polcomms researcher, Adhal Makkuraga Putra, remarked here on Tuesday.

Jakarta. The National Awakening Party, or PKB, has set a goal to win at least 75 percent of the votes in East Java province for presidential and vice presidential candidates Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla in the July 9 election, according to party chairman Muhaimin Iskandar.

Muhaimin, who is also the minister for manpower and transmigration, said all of the party’s members and volunteers must act in order to achieve this goal.

Jakarta. The national broadcasting watchdog has called on the Indonesian government to sanction two television news stations, MetroTV and tvOne, for imbalanced coverage on news surrounding the presidential election campaign.

Jakarta. Former Constitutional Court chief justice Mahfud M.D., the campaign manager for presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, has likened his campaign strategy to going to war.

And a war is what some observers fear, following a rousing comeback by Prabowo against his rival, Joko Widodo, in their second presidential debate on Sunday, and opinion polls that show the former military general closing the gap on, or even overtaking, the popular Jakarta governor.

The two competing presidential candidates, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, focused on people-based economy in their second presidential debate held in Grand Melia Hotel in Jakarta, on Sunday evening. The two candidates, however, displayed clear policy differences in the debate broadcast live on Metro TV.