KPU has evidence ready for election dispute

JAKARTA. Following a loss that has been taken bitterly by losing presidential ticket Prabowo Subianto-Hatta Rajasa, the Constitutional Court is scheduled to hold the first hearing Wednesday of a trial in which the ticket is challenging the election results naming rival Joko “Jokowi” Widodo-Jusuf Kalla the winner.

The Prabowo camp claims there was “massive and systematic” fraud in the July 9 poll that involved election committee officials and local administration leaders in 109 regencies and municipalities in 23 provinces that cost it millions of votes.

The Regional General Elections Commissions (KPUDs) that have been mentioned in the lawsuit have been busy preparing legal documents to be presented at the trial for five days in a row, KPU commissioner Ida Budhiati said on Tuesday.

“We foresaw the potential of an election dispute [during national vote tabulation],” she told reporters on the sidelines of evidence preparation at the Novotel Hotel in West Jakarta. “We have asked KPUDs to conduct problem mapping and make chronologies as well as prepare supporting documents.”

She said the KPU was currently verifying the chronologies of the problems raised by the Prabowo camp.

“Then the KPU’s legal bureau and advocate team will help prepare [the evidence] in legal terms within five days of the first court hearing,” Ida said.

The KPU announced Jokowi-Kalla the winner of the presidential election, securing 53.15 percent of about 133 million votes in the July 9 poll. The results saw the pair ahead of Prabowo-Hatta by about 8 million votes.

For the trial, the first thing the KPUDs have to do is prepare answers to questions that might be asked by Prabowo’s legal team during hearings as well as the list of evidence and witnesses.

Later, the KPUDs will discuss the list of answers, evidence and witnesses with the KPU’s advocate team, which is headed by prominent lawyer Adnan Buyung Nasution.

After obtaining permission from the KPU, the KPUDs will submit the listed evidence to the advocate team’s verification department.

The verified evidence then will be copied and legalized before being submitted once again to the KPU’s team of advocates for verification once more.

KPU commissioner Ferry Kurnia Rizkiyansyah said the prepared evidence was election-related documents, such as C7 forms (voters’ attendance list), C1 forms (recapitulation documents at polling stations) and A5 forms, which enabled voters to cast their vote at a different polling station than the one they were registered at. Ida said that the Prabowo camp initially only contested the election results in 11 provinces before adding more provinces in the revised lawsuit documents submitted to the court.

KPU legal bureau head Nur Syarifah said that Prabowo’s legal team should not have added more provinces as the law only allowed plaintiffs to amend errors or add evidence to a lawsuit.

“But it was the court’s authority to decide whether adding provinces was allowed or not,” she told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Prabowo’s legal team member Didi Supriyanto, who helped prepare the lawsuit, said the legal team was contesting the election results in all 33 provinces. However, details of 10 provinces had not been included in the lawsuit.

“But now we have prepared the details in all 33 provinces,” he told the Post on Tuesday. “We have fixed any errors and prepared all the required evidence.”

Constitutional Court Chief Justice Hamdan Zoelva said the panel of judges had agreed to be independent and free from intervention.

“There are no state institutions, political parties, organizations or protest groups that can steer our stance or opinion,” he said on Tuesday. (Hans Nicholas Jong)