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Poll bodies in hot water over regional election revotes
Petitions challenging the results of the 2024 regional election revotes may signal incompetence by poll bodies in organizing the election reruns, election observers have argued.
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A motorist passes in front of a banner about the 2024 regional election revote in Serang regency, Banten on April 18, 2025. The regency was one of 24 regions ordered by the Constitutional Court in February to hold a rerun of the 2024 regional elections. (Antara/Muhammad Bagus Khoirunas )
E
lection observers have cast doubt on the General Elections Commission’s (KPU) commitment to holding honest and fair election reruns in several regions, with parties set to challenge the results of revotes in seven regions at the court.
As of Thursday, 19 of 24 regions had held revotes for the 2024 regional leader elections, as ordered by the Constitutional Court in February after ruling in favor of petitions challenging the poll results. Three regions are slated to hold election reruns on May 24, while the remaining two will be on Aug. 6.
But the losing candidates declared by the KPU in seven regions have challenged the results of the revotes with the Constitutional Court. The justices are scheduled to examine their election dispute petitions against the KPU and the revote results in initial hearings on Friday.
More regions also saw similar challenges in the past few days.
One of these was Banjarbaru in South Kalimantan, where sole candidate pair Erna Lisa Halaby-Wartono was declared the winner of the revote by the city’s KPU office on Tuesday with around 56,000 votes.
But a local election watchdog challenged the result. It filed a petition with the court on Wednesday, alleging that the sole candidate pair bribed voters to vote for them instead of the “blank box”, which voters can choose to express their rejection of a sole candidate on a ballot.
Similar allegations were also raised in Serang regency, Banten, and Tasikmalaya regency, West Java.
