Twelve days ago, Prabowo Subianto declared victory in Indonesia’s presidential election despite the results of every single credible pollsters’ quick count results pointing to the opposite conclusion: that he had been soundly defeated by incumbent Joko Widodo by around 10% points.
Prabowo has declared victory multiple time since then, claiming his win was clear from his campaign’s (still undisclosed) exit poll data that also proved their (still unsubstantiated) allegations of systemic election fraud. But those claims seem increasingly farfetched as more of the data from the ongoing real vote count being conducted by the General Election Commission (KPU) comes in that continues to back up the accuracy of those same-day quick counts.
As of approximately 11am this morning, the KPU website showed that about 50.8% of all votes had been tabulated and thus far President Jokowi and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin had earned 56.23% of the vote while Prabowo and his running mate Sandiaga Uno had received 43.7% of the vote. That result is extremely close to the quick count results, based on a sample of the votes, published by pollsters on April 17.
KPU is legally required to finish the real count on or before May 22 and President Joko Widodo has indicated that he would wait until the official results were in before declaring victory.
Should the real count continue its consistent pace towards the same conclusion as the quick counts, it seems likely that Prabowo will attempt to take his claims of vote fraud to the Constitutional Court, just as he did in 2014 when he lost to Jokowi for the first time. However, in that instance, the country’s highest court declined to hear Prabowo’s case, even though the margin of votes between the two candidates was far smaller than they appear to be this year. So the odds that this year would be any different seem as fairly long, though not nearly as long as the odds that Prabowo will somehow claim victory besides all the current evidence to the contrary.
