“The district-level recapitulation will take 16 days, from April 18 to May 4,” KPU commissioner Viryan Azis said on Friday, adding that all ballots would arrive in Jakarta on April 25 after going through the regency and province levels.

The final counting day — when the final results are revealed — is expected to fall on May 22.

Viryan added counting over the past two days had been conducted transparently, as representatives of elections, participants and supervisors from the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) were supervising every step.

Despite the smooth counting process, the KPU conceded that voting on Wednesday was tinged with disappointment as some residents were unable to cast their ballots. The reasons varied, from logistical distribution problems to natural disasters, such as floods.

According to KPU data, 2,249 polling stations (TPS) across 18 regencies and cities will conduct voting or revoting due to a delay in ballot distribution.

Of these, 1,191 are located in the easternmost province of Papua, which lacks infrastructure.

Some 390 polling station in Banggai regency, Central Sulawesi, also failed to carry out voting because of a 6.9-magnitude earthquake that struck the region on April 12.

The remaining 747 are spread across North Sumatra’s remote island of Nias, Bintan regency in Riau Islands province, Jambi, Palembang in South Sumatra and East Kalimantan.

KPU commissioner Pramono Ubaid revealed that revoting had already been conducted in some areas in Papua and Jambi on Thursday. Revoting in Nias is scheduled for Saturday because its majority Christian inhabitants would be attending Good Friday services the day before.

“Revoting will also be done in East Kalimantan on Saturday,” Pramono told journalists at the KPU headquarters in Central Jakarta on Friday. Data from follow-up voting would be added to the ongoing counting process.

Pramono previously addressed allegations claiming the KPU tried to manipulate voting results in favor of a particular presidential candidate.

Early on Friday, screenshots of the official KPU website kpu.go.id began circulating on social media, showing a discrepancy between the commission’s recapitulation data and those of C1 tally forms from several polling
stations.

The KPU cited “human error” in response to the matter. It said that committees in at least five polling stations — in Maluku, West Nusa Tenggara, Central Java, Dumai in Riau and East Jakarta — had mistakenly entered the wrong figures into the KPU website, but the problem had been addressed right away.

As of Friday night, its real-count page, pemilu2019.kpu.go.id/#/ppwp/hitung-suara/, which is based on C1 forms, has only received data from 3 percent of polling stations.

Tensions intensified after presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto declared victory, which he has done three times since Wednesday afternoon, despite early counts from pollsters showing that he had lost to incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

In his latest victory claim at a Friday Mass, Prabowo was accompanied by National Mandate Party (PAN) patron Amien Rais, Gerindra Party deputy chairman Fadli Zon and economist Rizal Ramli. He asked his supporters to maintain peace and act in accordance with the constitution in guarding the count.

The Gerindra Party chairman claimed there had been efforts to nullify ballots, adding that his supporters must help safeguard C1 vote tally forms, which record the final vote count of each polling station, at the district level.

“Make sure that the figures they add to the vote count are the same as those on the C1 forms,” Prabowo said.

His running mate, Sandiaga Uno, was reportedly ill and could not attend the event. (ars)

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