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Indonesia election: Prabowo comes out swinging in votes dispute
Sydney Morning Herald - July 11, 2014
The comments dispel earlier indications that the Prabowo camp may be backing away from its victory claim. It lays the ground for a series of aggressive political and legal challenges to the result to be announced by the Election Commission on July 22.
However, anybody hoping to organise mass protests or riots on the streets will be hampered by the holy month of Ramadan and the Idul Fitri holiday, Indonesia's biggest. Many people will start returning to their villages on or shortly after July 23.
Mr Prabowo's brother and campaign manager, billionaire businessman Hashim Djojohadikusumo, insisted his team had access to its own "real count" of votes showing that by 5pm on Thursday the former army strongman was winning 51.67 per cent of the vote.
Mr Hashim said the latest figures sent by his coalition's operatives in the field to the "Prabowo-Hatta National Tabulation Centre" showed his brother with 43.9 million votes and Mr Joko with 40.1 million votes.
The numbers are not official figures, but Mr Hashim said they were drawn from scrutineers' accounts of official Election Commission documents called "C1" forms.
But the head of counting for Mr Joko's party, PDI-P, hit back with his own "real count" figures also based on scrutineers' copies of official forms.
Jarot Saeful Hidayat said that, with over half the votes counted, Mr Joko was ahead with 53.24 per cent support. In Jakarta, where all the votes had already been counted, Mr Joko had won 53.94 per cent, showing "most people want him to be president, not just governor", Mr Jarot said.
But Mr Hashim said late on Thursday his side also claimed victory, and was "philosophically opposed" to conceding defeat. It would wait for the Electoral Commission's ruling due on July 22, which is then subject to another month of appeals.
Meanwhile, Mr Hashim said he was "quite worried" about Mr Joko's camp cheating and changing the final result. "One of the things that makes us have very little sleep at night is worrying about having our votes threatened," he said. "We are not the only guys with money."
Mr Joko has voiced similar concerns, repeatedly requesting that his supporters "guard" the count in Indonesia's 480,000 polling booths and throughout the tortuous collation process, in case unnamed people attempt to "besmirch" the result.
But Mr Hashim said those comments and the victory declaration itself were an attempt to "hijack" the election result. "Psychology experts have told me that [those comments] would incite people. If they were to be able to form the opinion among a lot of people in Indonesia that they were winning and then, if they were to lose [and claim it was] because of cheating by us... that's what I'd characterise as a hijacking of democracy," Mr Hashim said.
He also attacked the pollsters who had predicted a Jokowi victory, saying a number of them were "neither independent nor credible", and relating stories about how he himself had hired three in previous campaigns, paying "a lot of money" to them.
Of the pollsters on his team's side who have predicted a Prabowo victory, though, he claimed ignorance about their financial arrangements with his brother's coalition.
One of those companies, JSI, was subject to a failed attack early on Friday morning when a small Molotov cocktail was thrown at its headquarters but failed to explode.
Mr Joko said on Thursday he believed Mr Prabowo was "a statesman and he will accept the result after the [election commission] makes its declaration".
However, in a blog post on Thursday, ANU academics Marcus Mietzner and Ed Aspinall said unequivocally that Mr Joko had won, but they believed Mr Prabowo would try to "steal" the election.
He would fail, they wrote, because too many votes needed to change hands and because "the scale of the manipulation required means it will be relatively easy to detect".
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