Presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto is seeking to disqualify his rival, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, with a legal petition at the Constitutional Court, but analysts say his legal team is facing an uphill battle to convince the bench to do exactly that.

In submitting the petition, Prabowo’s team also filed 51 pieces of evidence that they said proved the Jokowi camp committed “systemic, structured and massive” fraud resulting in a Prabowo loss.

“The 51 pieces of evidence consist of some documents and testimonies. There are fact witnesses and expert witnesses,” Prabowo team lawyer Bambang Widjojanto, a former Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) commissioner, said on Friday night.

However, some experts said they doubt the petition would be successful, expressing skepticism that the evidence would be convincing enough to overturn Jokowi’s winning margin of nearly 17 million votes.

“From what I saw, the petition seems very weak and most of the evidence is in the form of links to articles on news websites,” Andalas University constitutional law expert Feri Amsari told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

Election participants can only challenge election results at the Constitutional Court, as opposed to election process violations, which are adjudicated by the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu).

Feri said there were two ways the Prabowo camp could convince the court to overturn the General Elections Commission’s (KPU) decision: by presenting proof that the KPU’s vote tally documents, the C1 forms, have wrongly given at least 8.5 million votes to Jokowi instead of Prabowo or by demonstrating that the Jokowi camp committed fraud that was massive and widespread enough to affect the election results.

While Prabowo has repeatedly insisted his campaign team’s internal “real count” of votes showed that he had won, the petition seemed to indicate that his team would take the latter route.

“That will be very difficult because first they have to prove that misconduct actually happened and then they have to prove that the misconduct actually changed the results of the election,” Feri said.

For example, he said, the petition cited declarations by the heads of several West Sumatra regions who supported Jokowi as proof of “regional head bias” in the elections.

“Even if they can successfully prove that the regional heads did something wrong, Prabowo actually won in West Sumatra,” Feri said, adding that the challenger took about 86 percent of the vote there. “So it will be hard to prove that their support of Jokowi changed the results of the election.”

Bambang, as the Prabowo team’s lead lawyer, has had some previous successes at the court, most notably winning a dispute regarding the 2010 West Kotawaringin regency election, also citing systemic, structured and massive cheating.

However, Jentera Law School constitutional law expert Bivitri Susanti said there were some key differences between the West Kotawaringin petition and Prabowo’s current one.

“First of all, the sociopolitical context and the scale is very different: a regency versus a whole country,” she told the Post. “The margin between the two candidates was also much smaller, only a few thousand votes, compared to the millions of votes that separate Prabowo and Jokowi.”

Feri agreed, adding that while the West Kotawaringin petition was one of the strongest election dispute petitions he had ever seen, the Prabowo petition compared unfavorably to it.

“But that doesn’t mean the Prabowo team has no chance of winning at all. For example, if they can prove there was significant cheating in regions such as Central and East Java where Jokowi won by big margins, then it will be interesting,” he said. “But they will have to present better evidence than they did in the petition.”

If the court is convinced by the Prabowo camp’s arguments, there are several options it could take.

“The court usually considers the petitioner’s request when handing down its rulings,” Bivitri said. Prabowo’s petition asks that the court cancel the KPU’s announcement and disqualify Jokowi and declare Prabowo as the winner of the 2019 election or, failing that, to order the KPU to conduct “honest and fair” revotes “across all of Indonesia”.

Feri said that depending on the evidence, the court could order a completely new vote or just revotes at specific polling stations. “But if the number of affected polling stations is not significant, the court might not order revotes at all.”

The Jokowi camp has prepared its own legal team and said it was ready to respond to the petition as a related party.

“We predicted that [Prabowo would file a petition] and we formed a small team to compile evidence long before the KPU’s announcement,” the head of the Jokowi campaign’s legal and advocacy division, Ade Irfan Pulungan, said recently.

“We have already prepared evidence to rebut claims of election fraud,” the Jokowi legal team’s deputy chairman, Arsul Sani, said.

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