Indonesians have mobilized in their thousands to ensure the vote counting process in the presidential election is free and fair prior to the official announcement of the winner, expected on Tuesday.
Former Indonesian Army general Prabowo Subianto and Jakarta Governor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo both drew on different unofficial quick counts to declare they had won the July 9 election.
Emotions have run high during the ballot, the tightest and most divisive in Indonesia’s short democratic history, and the close contest has energized and mobilized voters.
Dhyta Caturani, a project officer at a local non-governmental organization in Jakarta, had never voted before, but this week was losing sleep to keep a watchful eye on the count.
“I’ve been staying up until two in the morning at the kecamatan [sub-district office] to watch the count and then going into the office in the morning,” she said.
In a country run by an elite pack and where parliamentarians are frequently embroiled in corruption scandals, Jokowi, an outsider with a clean reputation, has inspired an army of volunteers.
Caturani said several of her friends had taken leave to get behind the Jokowi campaign, and then to guard the vote.
From the village level, vote counts are subsequently verified at the sub-district, regional and provincial levels before they are sent to the national elections body. The complicated and bureaucratic process has raised fears vote tallies could be tampered with at several stages.
After quitting his job six months ago to become more deeply involved with the Jokowi volunteers, Anton Pradjasto has been monitoring the vote count in his area at each level.
“I just want to give a sense that we are there and we are watching,” he said. “We are sure Jokowi is the winner and we don’t want to be cheated.”
More than any election in the past, supporters on both sides have taken a proactive role in election monitoring.
On election day, voters paid particular attention to the C1 form, a document that shows the final tabulation of votes at individual polling booths.
Many voters waited at their local booths for hours so they could take photos of the forms and post them on social networks.
The newly created phone application iWitness, one of several election-related social media phenomena to spring up this year, allows voters to upload the forms and crosscheck the results at the national level so there is evidence of doctoring if the numbers do not match.
Describing as partisan the quick counts that point in favor of his opponent, Prabowo has repeatedly urged Indonesians to wait for the official announcement on Tuesday and maintained that he is in the lead.
“All of the real counts show I’m leading,” he told the BBC in an interview two days after the election.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion