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Prabowo allegations of hackers stealing votes completely unfounded: Police
Jakarta Globe - July 25, 2014
Indonesia voted on July 9 to elect a new president to replace Susilo Bambang Yuhoyono, who is reaching the end of his two-term limit. Despite achieving an extraordinary swing from Joko Widodo in a matter of months – as much as 30 percentage points by some estimates – Joko scraped through to win the tensely fought ballot by 53.15 percent to 46.85 percent.
Prabowo refused to admit defeat on July 22, the date the result was announced by the General Elections Commission (KPU). Since then he has claimed "massive" vote rigging robbed him of the presidency.
He has reported one division of the KPU to the police – in North Jakarta – and said that a garrison of foreign hackers from South Korea found a backdoor into the KPU's website and switched ballots to show people voting for Joko Widodo erroneously.
Prabowo's brother and wealthy backer Hashim Djojohadikusumo indicated on Wednesday that he believed the hacking arrests were election related. "I've been told that the 37 hackers – you've heard about the 37 hackers, yes – I've been told that the 37 hackers admitted to the police that they added... votes to Jokowi," Hashim said.
Accusations of foreign intervention in the election has been a theme in Prabowo's stump speeches – but the National Police told the Jakarta Globe that the arrests of the hackers were related to financial scams and that there was not a shred of evidence of any electioneering from abroad.
"It has nothing to do with the election," National Police spokesman Boy Rafli Omar said. "The arrest was about online crimes carried out in Indonesia but targeting people in China. We arrested them based on a report filed in China. All of them have already been deported. "We did not arrest nor detained any election-related hackers," he said.
While the KPU insisted that it was impossible to electronically manipulate the count, the head of the Indonesian association of information technology academics (FAIT) emphasized that the Prabowo camp's accusations had no basis in fact.
"It is impossible hackers can manipulate the vote-count tally because the recapitulation was conducted manually and, of course, has nothing to do with hacking," FAIT chairman Hotland Sitorus said on Friday.
The accusation of South Korean involvement in some grand plan to rig Indonesia's presidential election brought a rare intervention from Seoul. "The South Korean embassy strongly denies any allegation of the country's involvement in the case. For further explanation please check with the National Police's detective unit," the embassy said in a press release on Wednesday.
Anies Baswedan, the campaign spokesman of President-elect Joko Widodo, said he continued to have faith in the integrity of the KPU. "We believe in the performance of the KPU and the millions of people involved during the vote-counting process of the presidential election," Anies told the Globe. "The Jokowi-JK team believes in the KPU's credibility."
The Prabowo campaign, by contrast, believes the KPU is corrupt. "I was told that we have lost 4.4 million votes in East Java mysteriously," Hashim said on Wednesday.
"And I've been told that 1.9 million votes mysteriously were added to Jokowi. So we want to find out. Just give us time. Just give us time within our rights – we have the right to a revote. Why the rush? We have plenty of time."
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