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Quick counts and the integrity of the 2024 election
Amid allegations of electoral fraud, data analyses point to the general reliability and accuracy of quick counts, and that the real specter the public needs to watch for in future elections is information disorder.
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Almost there: The Surabaya General Elections Commission (KPUD) holds a plenary meeting on March 3, 2024 to finish tabulating ballots cast by voters in the East Java capital during the 2024 general election.
(Antara/Ananto Pradana)
The informal quick count results released by a number of pollsters indicate a victory for Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabuming Raka in the 2024 general election with around 57-58 percent of the vote.
The Centre for Strategic and International Studies-Cyrus Network (CSIS-CN) quick count on Feb. 14, which sampled 2,000 polling stations proportionally distributed across 38 provinces, found that the Prabowo-Gibran presidential pair had won 58.25 percent of the vote.
As this article was being written, however, the General Elections Commission (KPU) had reached a real count of 78.05 percent and Prabowo-Gibran had garnered 58.83 percent of valid votes.
The questions, then, are whether the official results of the simultaneous presidential and legislative elections will differ significantly from the quick count and how the future of Indonesia's elections should be evaluated.
On Feb. 29, the Safer Internet Lab (SAIL), a joint initiative involving the CSIS and Google, held a seminar titled "Multi-Party Collaboration to Maintain the Integrity of the 2024 Election Data". During the seminar, the initiatives for monitoring the 2024 election were explained and civil society groups shared their experience in maintaining the integrity of election data and detecting problems in vote counting and election-related information disorder.
Overall, the 2024 election demonstrated three best practices that can be replicated in the future: the role of quick counts as a tool to control election results, the rise of civil society initiatives in monitoring the elections and the decline in the spread of hoaxes and information disorder.
Using a margin of error (MoE) for quick counts ranging between 0.6 percent and 1 percent depending on the sample size used, the likelihood of different results in the presidential and legislative elections is minimal, no more than 1 percent.
