Jakarta – The margin of victory claimed by the 02 loosing ticket of Prabowo Subianto and running mate Sandiaga Uno in the 2019 presidential election keeps changing.
The rival camp, supporters of the winning 01 presidential ticket of incumbent President Joko Widodo and running mate Ma’ruf Amin believe this is evidence of inconsistency.
The Prabowo-Sandiaga camp however has shrugged off this assessment.
Initially, Prabowo claimed to have won by 62 percent. This figure then changed to 54.24 percent.
Now, during the legal challenge against the election result submitted with the Constitutional Court, the Prabowo camp claims to have won by 52 percent. They have declared victory with 68.650.239 votes (52 percent) against the Widodo-Ma’ruf ticket which received 63,573,169 votes (48 percent).
This is different from the General Election Commission’s (KPU) recapitulation result that is being challenged, which declared that Prabowo-Sandiaga garnered 68,650,239 votes (44.5 percent) and Widodo-Ma’ruf garnered 85,607,362 votes (55.5 percent).
“The 02’s claims have been inconsistent from the beginning. They claimed 62 percent, which changed to 56 percent. Now it’s 52 percent. So then, will the public believe in claims that keep changing?”, Widodo-Ma’ruf election campaign team (TKN) Deputy Secretary Raja Juli Antoni said to reporters on Thursday June 13.
The BPN has responded to the remarks by the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) politician by explaining that the changes in the percentages are a result of changes in the amount of data that has come in. The Prabowo camp believes that this is normal.
“Our calculations were in stages right. We didn’t receive all of the data immediately. It’s natural that there are changes and corrections in accordance with the data that come in”, BPN spokesperson and National Mandate Party (PAN) politician Saleh Partaonan Daulay told journalists.
BPN Coordinating Spokesperson Dahnil Anzar Simanjuntak explained that they are currently concentrating on irregularities in the 2019 presidential elections (pilpres) which were detrimental to them.
On the question of the changing percentage claims from 62 percent to 54 percent and now 52 percent, Simanjuntak said that this is the dynamics of data collection. This is normal like the general process of collecting data in surveys and exit polls.
“So there isn’t any inconsistency, what we are conveying are problems in our pilpres, particularly problems of honesty and fairness”, he said.
Bad maths
Meanwhile Bambang Widjojanto, the head of the legal team representing the Prabowo-Sandiaga ticket, says that they won the election with 71,247,792 votes.
This figure however is different from the one cited in the electoral challenge presented to the Constitutional Court were they claim to have won with 68,650,239 votes.
Based on the internal IT team’s calculations, said Widjojanto, the vote for the Prabowo-Sandiaga ticket was eroded by as much as 2.5 million votes while the vote for the Widodo-Ma’ruf ticket was inflated by around 20 million votes.
“So the actual vote count for the 01 ticket was around 62,886,362 (48 percent) and the vote for the 02 ticket around 71,247,792 (52 percent)”, said Widjojanto in a press release on Friday June 14.
The percentages quoted by Widjojanto however are not the same as those in a press release by the Prabowo-Sandiaga legal team. And if you do the maths, the percentages given are not accurate. Based on the latest figures being claimed, the percentage of votes received by Widodo-Amin is 47 percent while Prabowo-Sandiaga received 53 percent.
[Abridged translation by James Balowski based on two articles by Detik.com on June 14. The original title of the first article was “Klaim Menang Berubah 3 Kali, BPN Prabowo Tepis Isu Inkonsistensi”. The title of the second article was “Bikin Rilis Pers, Prabowo Kini Klaim Menang dengan Kantongi 71 Juta Suara”.]
