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Court grills witnesses

Mountains of evidence: Members of presidential candidate pair Prabowo Subianto–Sandiaga Uno‘s national campaign team organize documents it will use as evidence during hearing sessions of its lawsuit against the presidential election result at the Constitutional Court in Jakarta on Wednesday

Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Thu, June 20, 2019

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Court grills witnesses

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ountains of evidence: Members of presidential candidate pair Prabowo Subianto–Sandiaga Uno‘s national campaign team organize documents it will use as evidence during hearing sessions of its lawsuit against the presidential election result at the Constitutional Court in Jakarta on Wednesday. The Prabowo–Sandi legal team withdrew 94 boxes of evidence it had previously submitted for the lawsuit.(JP/Seto Wardhana)

Losing candidate Prabowo Subianto found his camp in hot water during the presidential election dispute hearing on Wednesday, as the Constitutional Court’s justices grilled his legal team and witnesses over their claims of widespread electoral fraud in the election.

The justices even questioned the whereabouts of evidence necessary for the Prabowo-Sandiaga Uno pair to prove its claim that there had been an incorrect final voter list (DPT), which the ticket alleged had inflated the number of votes gained by incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his vice presidential candidate Ma’ruf Amin.

Prabowo’s legal team presented a total of 14 witnesses and experts during an hours-long hearing session to strengthen what experts dubbed a seemingly weak lawsuit — the camp’s last-ditch effort to overturn Jokowi’s reelection victory.

Various testimonies, ranging from millions of alleged invalid ID card numbers to suspected vote-stamping attempts by an election worker, were brought before the nine-panel bench, whose members were by turns angry and amused by the witnesses.

Agus Muhammad Maksum, an IT director in the Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team, was the first witness who testified that his team had found, among other things, more than 1 million voters on the DPT with invalid ID card numbers and hundreds of thousands of others with invalid family card numbers that made up the figure of 17.5 million problematic voters.

He gave the example of someone named “Udung”, whose ID card number had an unregistered provincial code but he was listed on the DPT, and suggested that he and other people with such invalid ID cards were made-up voters.

“These people don’t exist in real life so even if we [look for them], we won’t find them,” Agus told the court.

However, when General Elections Commission (KPU) commissioner Hasyim Asy’ari asked whether Agus had located Udung or not, Agus said that he and his team had not carried out fact checking because the ID card number itself was invalid.

Justice I Dewa Gede Palguna grew angry at Agus, pointing out that the witness had made conflicting statements that confused the court, leading Agus to reaffirm that he actually “did not know” whether the people existed or not.

When pressed for details over whether he could be sure that the 17.5 million so-called problematic voters, or some of them, had participated in the election, Agus admitted that he was not sure.

The Prabowo ticket accused the KPU of “systematically, structurally and massively” rigging the election and inflating the incumbent’s tally — which stood at 85 million votes against Prabowo’s 68 million votes — by around 22 million votes.

In its lawsuit, the Prabowo-Sandiaga ticket alleged that the official election result had been rigged by a dubious DPT, which included 17.5 million problematic voters, as well as an additional 5.7 million voters on the special voter list (DPK).

Justice Enny Nurbaningsih, however, told the Prabowo legal team that she could not find the evidence supporting the allegations among the trove of dossiers submitted by the presidential ticket to the court.

“I’ve been looking for the evidence that shows the 17.5 million [problematic] voters, but to no avail,” Enny said, requesting that the Prabowo legal team immediately submit the evidence because she wanted to compare it with the KPU’s data.

“This is very important for us to clearly identify the invalid ID card and family card numbers that made up the 17.5 million.”

Dorel Almir, one of the lawyers in Prabowo’s legal team, said they had prepared the printed forms of the evidence but could not submit the dossiers yet because there happened to be a technical problem.

Beti Kristiana, a witness from Boyolali, Central Java, testified that she had found a trove of signed envelopes allegedly containing the original C1 vote tally forms at 7:30 p.m. on April 18 — a day after election day — scattered in a field at Juwangi subdistrict office.

In her initial argument, she said that she had found three people in the office — whom she identified as election workers — who allegedly were putting C1 forms into envelopes. The election workers said that the envelopes were just trash, but she did not believe this because there were about four sacks of the papers.

However, after being questioned by KPU lawyer Ali Nurdin, she said that she was wrong and the people were subdistrict election committee (PPK) members.

When pressed for details over which vote tally forms the witness had seen, as well as how she could identify that the documents were indeed vote-count papers, Beti said she thought so because “the papers were large and wide” and admitted that she did not see the details of the wording written on the documents.

Human rights activist and legal advocate Haris Azhar had been proposed as a witness by the Prabowo legal team because he had provided legal assistance for former Pasirwangi Police chief Adj. Comr. Sulman Aziz when the latter was allegedly ordered by senior police officers to support Jokowi and Ma’ruf in the election. However, in a letter to the court, Haris said that he declined to testify because at the time he had merely been carrying out his duty as a lawyer representing Sulman in his case.

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