IO, Jakarta – Not agreeing with the results of the vote total for the presidential election announced by the General Election Commission (KPU), the stronghold of the presidential candidate and vice-presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto and Sandiago Salahuddin Uno submitted a dispute request to the Constitutional Court (MK). The 02 faction did not accept the results of the KPU’s vote count, which announced the pair of Joko Widodo-Ma’ruf Amin was superior with 85,607,362 votes or 55.50%, while the number of legitimate votes for Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno’s votes was 68,650,239 or 44.50% of the total national legitimate votes.
The Petitioner’s attorney, Bambang Widjojanto, asserted that the results of the vote count conducted by the KPU were determined through improper, unlawful, fraudulent means, exacerbated by abuse of power. Bambang said the violation of the law was electoral fraud of the electoral threshold, manipulating votes in a structured, systematic, and massive (TSM) manner, in a constitutional violation of fully honest and fair electoral principles. “According to the Petitioner, Jokowi-Maruf’s actual vote was only 63,573,169 or 48%, while Prabowo-Sandiaga was 68,650,239 or 52%. “Election fraud or electoral fraud was carried out through TSM,” he said.
Bambang also pointed out how Vice President Candidate number 01 had not yet resigned from his position as the official of BUMN (Chair of the Sharia Supervisory Board) and further how Jokowi’s campaign fund contribution was Rp19 billion, even though Jokowi’s own wealth was only IDR 6.1 billion. In addition, there were donations of Rp18.1 billion and Rp. 33 billion from the names of certain groups with the addresses and tax identification numbers (NPWP) of the same group leader, while the NIK was a different contributor.
Legal counsel of the applicant, Denny Indrayana, also stressed that the 2019 election should have been an open and balanced competition in which Candidate number 02 was facing Candidates number 01, but instead was facing the incumbent President Joko Widodo. He considered the incumbent presidential candidate had abused his power and exploited state facilities, including misuse of the state budget and state apparatus.
The other Petitioners’ attorney, Teuku Nasrullah, said that there was intimidation of Surabaya KPU polling stations by the Election Supervisory Board (Bawaslu), not to redo the election at those polling stations, as they intended. A similar case was reported from Papua, where the General Elections Commission (KPU) had to follow the recommendations of the Bawaslu there.
On that occasion also the Petitioner revealed that there were 17,500,000 invalid names on the final voter list (DPT) and the Respondent was never able to confirm the accuracy of the information as submitted by the Petitioner. The Respondent on April 17, 2019 (the day of the voting) added as many as 5,700,000 names to the Special Voters list.
The Petitioner expects the Constitutional Court to adhere to the law, applying substantive justice as stipulated by Article 22E paragraph (1) of the 1945 Constitution. This approach holds that the Court is authorized to examine all stages of the election process – not simply limited to the vote counting process, but all stages.
Respondents challenge the claim of the applicant
On the second session on Tuesday (6/18/2019), the agenda saw a response from the defendant (KPU), related parties (Jokowi-Amin Legal Team), and Bawaslu, for the lawsuit submitted by the applicant (Prabowo-Sandi Legal Team). The KPU and the Jokowi-Amin Law Team confronted all the petitions submitted by the applicant (Prabowo-Sandi Legal Team), including the claim that the execution of the Presidential election was a structured, systematic and massive fraud (TSM).
The Respondent questioned the claim of the applicant by stating that the revised lawsuit entered by Prabowo-Sandiaga was at the first hearing. Further, the KPU considers the claim filed by party 02 to influence public opinion into believing the Constitutional Court will not be professional in handling this case.
KPU attorney Ali Nurdin said that the Petitioner’s argument stating that it was difficult for him to uncover evidence was considered by the KPU to not be because the applicant received threats and intimidation, but because of unclear arguments that were not based on clear facts and evidence. In addition, the KPU also assessed the applicant’s argument that requested the Court to participate in carrying out verification in the trial, based on information from the mass media, had violated a fast, effective and simple judicial principle, because the Constitutional Court was still being asked to prove the truth of the video.
In addition, regarding the arguments of the applicant who questioned the KPU calculation system (situng), Ali Nurdin said that this was only an error in inputting data at 21 polling stations. “Even if compared to the total number of polling stations in Indonesia, the issue of data input is less than one percent and not significant,” said Ali. The KPU also asked the Constitutional Court judges to reject all of Prabowo-Sandiaga’s claims, especially regarding the differences in the results of the vote recapitulation determined by the KPU and internally by 02. The Constitutional Court was asked to ratify the vote count results that had been done manually by the KPU from all polling stations to the national level.
In line with the Respondent, the related party, represented by the Chairperson of the Jokowi-Ma’ruf Legal Counsel Team, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, stated that the Court should not accept the lawsuit filed by 02 because the case was outside the Court’s authority. For example, the alleged structured, systematic and massive (TSM) practice of fraud should be the authority of the Bawaslu to explore and sanction the report, not that of the Constitutional Court. Yusril also mentioned that claims by 02 were not clear regarding what requests and demands were, because the 02 team did not provide details in the previous lawsuit.
In addition, Yusril responded to the issue of incumbent leave during the campaign period, which was interpreted as an abuse of power, a presumptuous and unacceptable statement for the Constitutional Court to consider. The 01 legal counsel team also requested the Court to reject the 02 team’s claim regarding disqualification of candidate Jokowi-Ma’ruf in 2019 Presidential Elections for allegedly committing fraud at TSM.
I Wayan Sudirta responded to the argument about the non-neutrality of the intelligence apparatus based on a statement of 2004-2014 Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) at a press conference on June 23, 2018 in Bogor: Sudirta said that SBY’s statement had nothing to do with the 2019 Election, but rather related to Regional Elections (Pilkada) simultaneously in 2018. “The petitioner twisted the context of SBY’s statement and manipulated it to seem as if it was related to the 2019 Election. For such allegations, the Petitioners’ argument for the Court should be totally excluded,” said Sudirta.
The next related party, namely the Election Supervisory Body (Bawaslu) of the Republic of Indonesia, denied that it had ever received an intelligence partiality report from one of the candidate pairs and that police officers carried out data collection on community support for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. “The Petitioner states in the argument that there was an intelligence alignment with one of the presidential and vice-presidential candidate pairs. In fact, Bawaslu and its staff never received any report related to intelligence alignment with one of the candidate pairs,” said Chairman of the Indonesian Election Supervisory Body Abhan. Regarding the position of vice-presidential candidate 01 Ma’ruf Amin in several state-owned banks as questioned by 02 faction, the Election Supervisory Body gave its own response. Abhan stated that no article had been violated regarding this matter. Ma’ruf was adjudged to be justified in participating in the 2019 Presidential Election.
A number of Witnesses were intimidated
In the third session of the dispute over the 2019 Presidential Election Prabowo-Sandi presented 14 witnesses and 2 expert witnesses at the Constitutional Court Building on Wednesday (06/19/2019). Agus Muhammad Maksum was the first witness to uncover the findings of the Unusual Final Voters List (DPT) with a special code reaching 17.5 million in the 2019 Presidential Election. Agus explained that the findings of the unnatural DPT included the issue of a fake Population Identification Number (NIK) Family (NKK), suspicious similarities in birth dates, to the extent that KK was manipulative and the number was invalid. “From our findings, it turns out that there are DPTs that have no KK: NIK is also missing,” he said.
He explained that the data on the findings of a special coded DPT consisted of similarities in the date of birth as “July 1” at 9.8 million, or on “December 31”, at 9.8 million, and on “January 1” at 2.3 million. “So there is a total of 17.5 million unnaturally-coded data,” said the BPN IT volunteer.
According to him, the number of similarities in the date of birth is not consistent with normal data. Referring to the statement from statisticians, he continued, the maximum amount of data that carried the same date of birth (“January 1”) should have been 520 thousand, a number obtained from a total of 190 million divided by 365 days a year. “That’s a reasonable average. Then why did July 1 emerge at 9.8 million? This is 20 times higher. Then December 31, 10 times higher. January 1, 2.5 million is five times. We state this is unnatural,” he declared.
What’s more, he found 117,333 KK manipulated and 18.8 million invalid data in five provinces. “This data should be rejected because it is invalid, so we come to the KPU and we point out how this data is an unnatural amount, while they still stick with the data they have,” he said.
The next witness, IT expert Hermansyah, highlighted the error in inputting data related to vote acquisition. “I went to the Central KPU on May 3 and the Bogor Election Commission on May 4 along with Fadli Zon. On the side of the central KPU, there were many weaknesses in terms of reporting: I noted some 73 thousand errors on the input side reported to Bawaslu and so on – that’s what I read,” he said.
According to him, one of the most basic weaknesses is how to input votes into the counting information system (Situng). If the reason is how to calculate a percentage text without C1, it should not be (like that) because of the technology that we have now. It should not happen again, so slowly or erroneously.
This witness for Prabowo also questioned the performance of data input and verifiers. He said that the KPU stipulated that there were 25 related officials. “But when I visited Bogor there were only about 4 people and a verifier was a civil servant – and he got the civil servant admin from the Bogor Election Commission,” he said.
The KPU legal team had previously considered the Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno legal team as having failed to understand the KPU’s vote counting information system.” Allegations of engineering votes to deliver a win to one candidate are false accusations put forward by one of the applicants, namely WN, who was arrested only one day ago on Monday by the National Police Criminal Investigation Unit for spreading false news that the KPU server was leaked to win the Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin candidate pair, maintaining victory of the related party by 57 percent,” Ali Nurdin said, reading out a statement on Tuesday (6/18).
According to the KPU team, the applicant, namely, Prabowo-Sandiaga, never questioned the process of counting the votes at polling stations or the recapitulation of the results of manual vote counting at the sub-district level, which became the basis for determining the calculation of national level acquisition. The recording of data of the KPU calculation was confirmed by the legal team not as a source of tiered recapitulation data which is the basis for calculating vote acquisition at the national level.
In addition, Hermansyah said if Monday and Tuesday, before he testified at the Court Building, he suspected that some 5 cars were parked in front of his house, in Depok, West Java. “There were a number of cars stopping at my house, and it is not common. I felt threatened, sir,” Hermansyah told Constitutional Court judge I Dewa Gede Palguna. Constitutional judge Palguna asked whether Hermansyah asked for police protection, but Hermansyah claimed he had not done so. “He said he felt there was a threat, only your assumptions, right now do you feel threatened?” Palguna asked.
In addition to Hermansyah, a Witness from the other Prabowo-Sandi legal team, Nur Latifah, claimed to have been intimidated regarding a video of ballots that had been punched. Ballots called “witnesses” were punched by KPPS members in Winongsari Village, Wonosegoro, Boyolali, Central Java.
“I received intimidation from many people. On April 19 that night I was called to the house of one of the residents. There was already the chairman of the KPPS, members of the KPPS, village leaders, party cadres, and some thugs. I was accused of being a political criminal” said Nur Latifah.
Then, on April 21, 2019, Nur Latifah claimed to have been summoned again. This time the witness was asked not to disseminate information about ballots punched by unauthorized parties. “I was asked to shut up and go back to Semarang. I am actually studying in Semarang,” she said.
Constitutional judge Suhartoyo asked about the form of threats received. The witness mentioned hearing information from a village friend named Habib about a threat aimed at him. “Indirectly I was threatened with death – I heard this from my friend, heard that I would be killed,” said Nur Latifah. But Nur Latifah said she did not report the news of the death threats. “I did not do anything,” she said. “As long as the threat is not directly said to me, I feel safe,” added the witness.
(D. Ramdani)