Police officers setting up rolls of barbed wireto close off Jalan Imam Bonjol,
near the General Elections Commission’s headquarters
in Central Jakarta on Thursday.
Security has been stepped up ahead of the
formal declaration of the election results on Saturday
Final vote counts from the July 8 presidential election released on Thursday showed that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won re-election in a landslide with nearly 61 percent of the total vote, despite election officials rejecting demands by the campaign of third-place finisher Jusuf Kalla to halt the count due to voters list irregularities. The campaign team of former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who finished a distant second in the poll, vowed to contest the final results before the Elections Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) and Constitutional Court. Both Megawati and Kalla, the outgoing vice president, are refusing to sign off on the final results in protest. Nonetheless, the General Elections Commission (KPU) is scheduled to formally declare the results on Saturday. KPU chairman Abdul Hafiz Anshary said that the commission had no cause to stop the count, which began on Wednesday, because the objection from the Kalla camp pertained to the voters list and not the final vote count. “The election results will still be legitimate, even without the signatures of witnesses or even KPU members,” he said at the commission’s headquarters in Central Jakarta. The final results, from 33 provinces and overseas polling stations, show that Yudhoyono won 73,874,562 votes, or 60.8 percent; Megawati with 32,548,105 votes, or 26.79 percent; and Kalla with 15,081,814 votes, or 12.41 percent. Yudhoyono won 28 provinces, Kalla four and Megawati one. Nearly 50 million registered voters did not show up on election day, and 6.5 million ballots were declared invalid. The results confirmed that Yudhoyono met the requirements to be declared the winner in one round. The law requires candidates to win more than 50 percent of the total vote and 20 percent of the vote in at least 17 provinces to avoid a runoff. The final count was carried out amid unprecedented levels of security following the terrorist attacks in Jakarta last Friday. Visitors to the KPU headquarters were searched three times by police and forced to pass through an X-ray machine. Police jammed phone signals inside the building, forcing journalists to make phone calls and send text messages outside. Representatives of Megawati’s campaign only attended the first day of counting, while members of Kalla’s campaign walked out on Thursday. Prior to the election, the Megawati and Kalla camps had protested that millions of eligible voters were left off the final voters list, and they have continued to cry foul for the past two weeks. Zulfikar, an official from Kalla’s Golkar Party, on Thursday afternoon delivered a letter to KPU officials demanding that they stop the count because of “serious problems” with the voters list. “We cannot agree to continue counting the election results since the voters list has been bad since the beginning,” he said. Arif Wibowo, a senior member of the Megawati campaign, said that his faction had decided to join the Kalla campaign in rejecting the election results, calling them “against the law.” As counting began, KPU officials caused an uproar by admitting that they secretly revised the final voters list just two days before the election.
Author: The Jakarta Globe
