Prabowo Subianto and his supporters have been making unsubstantiated claims that there was massive and systemic fraud involved in the April 17th election as justification for the candidate’s repeated claims of victory over President Joko Widodo (despite all of the data from the same-day quick counts and ongoing real vote count data projecting a victory of more than 10% for Jokowi).
Now a group of Jokowi supporters has gotten together to challenge Prabowo’s camp to present their proof of fraud, even dangling a huge financial reward in their faces to make their put-up-or-shut-up point.
The group, calling themselves the ‘Alliance of 7 Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin Volunteers’ held a press conference today to announce that they would give IDR 100 billion (US$ 7 million) to The any supporters of Prabowo who can prove the existence of structured, systematic and massive fraud in the presidential election.
Several of the groups involved in the alliance are Muslim organizations that have been supporting the incumbent. Representatives said the funds required to guarantee the reward came from a number of Muslim entrepreneurs.
“Some Muslim business owners were very concerned about the proliferation of slander that has been circulating. So these Muslim entrepreneurs are ready to give a reward of IDR 100 M to anyone from the [Prabowo camp] who can prove the existence of massive and structural fraud in the 2019 presidential election that was conducted by [Jokowi’s camp], that caused at least 5% of the vote to to be lost by [Prabowo’s ticket],” the alliance said in a joint statement that was received by Detik today.
In the statement, the alliance admitted that there had been some isolated incidents of mishaps at polling stations and incorrect data being input into election forms that might call into question the results from some areas. But they argued that those incidents had led to votes being lost by both Prabowo’s ticket and Jokowi’s and that the overall number of incidents was tiny compared to the massive size of this year’s election.
Diki Chandra, head of the Muslim Cyber Army for Jokowi, said that the full rules of the challenge would be published as a notarized document tomorrow of the day after.
Prabowo’s camp has yet to offer any response to the challenge (his campaign has already refused to release the internal exit poll data they claim shows Prabowo won by 62%). But if they did have irrefutable proof that massive and systemic fraud took place during the election they’d probably take it first to the Constitution Court, the only body that could potentially overturn the results of the election.
However, there seems to be little to no chance of that happening considering that the same court declined to even hold an official hearing on Prabowo’s voter fraud claims after he lost to Jokowi for the first time back in 2014 by a margin far smaller than this year’s projected 10%. So the odds that this year would be any different seem fairly long, though not nearly as long as the odds that Prabowo will somehow emerge the victor once all the dust has settled.
Reader Interactions