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Bawaslu rejects Prabowo team's report on ‘systematic’ cheating

Prabowo team claimed Jokowi's decision to raise civil service salaries shortly before the election was a "systematic" violation of campaign fairness.

News Desk (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Mon, May 20, 2019

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Bawaslu rejects Prabowo team's report on ‘systematic’ cheating The Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team reported to Bawaslu that incumbent Jokowi and his running mate Ma’ruf had allegedly resorted to vote-buying to persuade civil servants and government workers to vote for them. (Wikimedia Commons/musnahterinjak)

T

he Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) has rejected a report filed by the Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno campaign team alleging that the Joko “Jokowi” Widodo-Ma’ruf Amin ticket used vote-buying tactics to persuade civil servants to vote for it.

“We declare that the report alleging structured, systematic and massive campaign violations has been rejected,” Bawaslu head Abhan said during a pretrial hearing on Monday in Jakarta, as quoted by Antara.

Bawaslu said that it had declined to follow up on the report because of a lack of evidence.

The Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team had cited printed online news reports as evidence, which according to Bawaslu failed to fulfill its “systematic” criteria.

A member of the Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team, Dian Fatwa of the National Mandate Party (PAN), said that Bawaslu’s decision was “strange” and “unfair”.

“We used the news regarding Government Regulation no. 15/2019 on pay raises for state civil servants as evidence,” she said in a statement, referring to a regulation issued on March 13, which was within the campaign period.

“This was vote-buying. What is the difference between this and legislative candidates giving out money and food, or even promising voters they can go on umrah [minor haj]?” she added.

She said that such a move was made possible by Jokowi’s incumbent status and cited news reports saying that the regulation had helped boost the electability of the Jokowi-Ma’ruf ticket, which the team had also filed as evidence with Bawaslu.

The team also pointed to Government Regulation No. 11/2019 on pay raises for village officials signed on February 28 as evidence and had prepared a number of state officials as witnesses.

Dian said Bawaslu’s decision was unfair as the agency did not bother questioning witnesses prepared by her team and questioned the agency’s credibility. (ars)

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