Early vote counts show that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo is set to clinch a second term, following a hard-fought seven-month battle against his challenger, Prabowo Subianto.

A plurality of quick counts, including those conducted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Cyrus Network, Kompas, Indikator Politik Indonesia and Saiful Mujani Research & Consulting (SMRC), showed the Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin ticket had 54 to 56 percent of the vote against Prabowo-Sandiaga Uno’s 44 to 46 percent.

The quick counts all surveyed around 2,000 polling stations across the country’s 34 provinces and had margins of error of 1 percent or less.

“We all can see what the quick counts and exit polls indicate,” Jokowi said at the Jakarta Theater, Central Jakarta, on Wednesday afternoon.

“However, we have to be patient and wait for the official recapitulation of votes by the KPU [General Elections Commission].”

The official election results will only be announced by the KPU in a month’s time, after ballots from all of the 810,329 polling stations across the country are counted and recapitulated.

Jokowi, who thanked all election organizers and security personnel for their efforts to ensure a free and fair election, went on to call for Indonesians to mend relations after the election.

Despite Jokowi’s apparent comfortable lead according to established pollsters, Prabowo claimed that he had won the election, citing internal vote counts that showed him at 62 percent of the vote.

“This is a victory for all of the Indonesian people,” he said on Wednesday night outside his house in Kertanegara, South Jakarta.

“I will be a president for all Indonesians. Brothers and sisters who supported [Jokowi], I will still defend you. I will and already am the president of all the Indonesian people. We will build a victorious, just and prosperous Indonesia.”

He urged his supporters not to be provoked or use “methods that are outside the law”.

His comments mirrored those he made after the 2014 presidential elections, in which he also initially claimed to have won.

Prabowo and then-running mate Hatta Rajasa filed a lawsuit against the 2014 results with the Constitutional Court, claiming that massive and systematic fraud occurred during the election. The court dismissed the suit.

The Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team indicated that the pair would submit a similar lawsuit following this year’s race.

“We will file a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court if [Jokowi] wins because they conducted organized fraud. We have gathered the evidence,” Prabowo campaign spokesperson and Democratic Party politician Ferdinand Hutahean said.

KPU chairman Arief Budiman urged candidates not to take to the streets to contest the election results, saying that vote counting was very transparent.

“The KPU does not conduct quick counts, we do a real count,” he said. “Use exit polls and surveys as a reference or source of information. Wait for the KPU to state the results.”

CSIS executive director Philips Vermonte said the organization’s quick count data showed “a completely different picture” from Prabowo’s claims.

“The method for quick counts is already established and the margin of error is only 1 percent. So even if there is a difference, it shouldn’t be that big of a difference,” he told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. “So I would expect his internal team to reveal how they [conducted the count] and we will compare notes.”

Jokowi, who rose from being the mayor of Surakarta, Central Java, to the presidency in less than a decade, was among the first batch of leaders to come to power through direct regional elections, which were among the reforms that were enacted following the fall of the New Order in 1998.

Polls showed him in the lead throughout the campaign period, which started in September 2018, with the final surveys showing him with a healthy two-digit lead a week before election day.

Observers cited strong approval ratings, largely because of consistently low inflation and the popularity of his social welfare programs, as the main reason for his victory.

“There has been an improvement in the people’s quality of life in the last four-and-a-half years,” SMRC program director Sirajuddin Abbas told the Post.

“For example, statistically poverty levels have gone down and access to education and health care has gone up, while staple food prices have remained stable.”

Philips also said Jokowi had shored up his supporter bases in Central and East Java, while making some headway in Banten, which is considered a Prabowo stronghold.

In 2014, Jokowi won Central Java, which is a traditional stronghold of his Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), in a landslide and won East Java by a significant margin. He lost both Banten and West Java to Prabowo, however.

During the campaign period, both Jokowi and Prabowo targeted each other’s bases, with Jokowi spending a lot of time in Banten and West Java and Prabowo setting up his campaign headquarters in Central Java.

But the quick count results indicated that neither candidate had been particularly successful.

“[The quick count] probably shows that the actual voters who supported either Prabowo or Jokowi have not changed very much, in terms of geographical spread,” he said.

The 2019 elections, which have been dubbed the most complex one-day elections in the world, went smoothly and peacefully, despite glitches in some regions.

Elections in some districts in Jayapura, Papua, have been delayed until Thursday because of logistical problems.

Turnout was unexpectedly high, with polling organizations estimating that around 80 percent of registered voters had participated in the elections, the highest rate since the 2004 legislative election and the highest ever for a presidential election.

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