The General Elections Commission (KPU) has started its manual vote counting for Wednesday’s presidential election to replace counting based on short messages (SMS) sent from its regional branches.

The KPU stopped publishing results originating from text messages on Thursday, stating the decision had not been taken because of technical problems or protests from losing candidates.

“The results people have been seeing in the last few days are coming from text messages from our regional branches,” KPU member Syamsulbahri told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

“We decided to start the manual vote counting and we thought there were no reasons to update results based on text messages anymore.”

Syamsul said the KPU would finish and publish the official manual vote count between July 22-24.

“Hopefully, we will be able to finish the count by that time,” he said.

The KPU does not advertise the progress of the manual vote counting until the official announcement.

The SMS-based results published by the KPU stopped at around 18 million votes and showed the incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the winner of the election with 61.66 percent of votes.

Former president Megawati Soekarnoputri of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) came a distant second with 28.57 percent of votes while incumbent Vice President Jusuf Kalla of the Golkar Party was third with only 9.77 percent of votes.

The commission’s SMS-based vote count results were very similar to unofficial quick count results published by several pollsters.

The pollsters showed Yudhoyono would win with some 60 percent of the votes, followed by Megawati with 25 percent and Kalla with 12 percent. (hdt)

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