The Sirekap application, a new addition to the general election, was initially offered by the KPU as a way for the public to monitor the tabulation process before the poll body announces the official winners by March 20 at the latest.

The application, however, courted controversy after people voiced complaints on social media about irregularities in vote count data on Sirekap, and the camps of presidential candidates Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo claimed to have found alleged inflated vote numbers for presumptive winner Prabowo Subianto.

This has led to accusations from both camps that Sirekap has been engineered to favor Prabowo, widely seen as President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s favored successor who ran alongside the President’s son Gibran Rakabuming Raka.

It also prompted the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) to recommend on Sunday the KPU to stop releasing vote tally on Sirekap to avoid more public disturbance.

Most recently, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which backed Ganjar, sent a letter to the KPU demanding that the poll agency stop the use of Sirekap and return strictly to manual means of vote tallying, and called for a forensic audit of the application.

But the KPU insisted on continuing with Sirekap, with commissioner Idham Holik saying, according to various news reports, that the application “can still be accessed by the public” and that the official results would still be based on the KPU’s manual tabulation, rather than the vote count displayed on Sirekap.