“With or without witnesses, the tabulation plenary [meetings] are still running and they are still valid as long as the Elections Supervisory Agency [Bawaslu] oversees the process,” Evi said on Wednesday.

Evi said official tabulation plenaries in regencies and cities were an open forum to verify and officiate vote count results from polling stations, and therefore the KPU invited witnesses from candidates and political parties. However, it would not be a problem if they did not come.

“[The KPU] is responsible for completing and officiating the final results,” she said.

As of the last plenary meeting on Tuesday night, Evi said, all witnesses of the candidate pairs and political parties were still present.

“As of last night there were still witnesses from the Prabowo-Sandiaga ticket at the plenary meeting,” Evi said.

Evi said the Prabowo-Sandiaga witnesses had never brought their own tabulation data to the plenary meetings.

“They should show their data at the plenary meetings so we can compare it with the central KPU data and other elections participants’ data, Bawaslu and the provincial KPU […] please submit it to the forum,” she said.

Presidential candidate Prabowo said on Tuesday that he would not accept the final result of the election issued by the KPU, which is expected to show that incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo secured his reelection.

Prabowo also claimed that his own campaign team had its own data showing that he won the race.

The deputy chairman of Prabowo’s campaign, Priyo Budi Santoso, said the camp would withdraw its witnesses from the official vote counting process at the KPU, after the campaign’s internal tabulation showed that the pair was winning the presidential election.

“All witnesses in the central, provincial and regency or city KPU are planned to be withdrawn,” Priyo said on Tuesday.

A vote tabulation website controlled by pro-Prabowo volunteer groups, the National Tabulation of Volunteers for Changing President (Tabanas) showed that Prabowo had won 59 percent of the vote. Their data accommodated all provinces except Papua and West Papua.

Meanwhile, As of Wednesday, the vote count tabulation on the KPU’s online data tabulation center had gathered more than 82 percent of the data from more than 810,000 polling stations nationwide and showed that Jokowi-Ma’ruf Amin led with 56 percent of the vote, while the Prabowo-Sandiaga Uno ticket had garnered 43.7 percent.

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