The General Elections Commission (KPU) and the Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu), the institutions responsible for ensuring the legislative and presidential elections are run in a free and fair manner, have repeatedly denied any possibility of vote rigging. But it is difficult to trust the PSI’s vote tally, as from the beginning the party has circumvented electoral norms.

The union of concerned political parties in the House of Representatives is right to push for the exercise of the body’s the right of inquiry into what has been called “large-scale election fraud”. The probe, if it materializes, should also seek an explanation for the PSI’s last-minute uptick in votes.

A failure to provide enough evidence to assuage public concerns will add to perceptions that the February general election was the worst the country has organized since its transition to democracy in 1999.

The PSI has raised many eyebrows as its proportion of the tallied vote suddenly rose from between 2.6 and 2.8 percent to 3.13 percent within only a few days, moving closer to the 4 percent of the vote required to send representatives to the House. No newcomer party has ever crossed the threshold since the policy’s inception in the 2009 election.

A self-styled youth party, the PSI created a series of controversies ahead of the general election. It welcomed President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s youngest son, Kaesang Pangarep, on board in September 2023 only to name him the new chairman two days later. It also declared its support for Prabowo Subianto’s presidential bid, contradicting its hostility to the former general in the 2019 election.

Some experts say the drastic increase in the PSI’s votes contradicts the quick counts by various credible pollsters, which projected that the party had won less than 3 percent of the vote. The wider the discrepancy between the quick counts and the PSI’s real vote tally, the more cause for concern that either the pollsters or the real tally are significantly wrong.

An investigation into possible vote rigging must not set out to delegitimize the results of last month’s elections, as some people have demanded. At the same time, however, we should make sure that no electoral manipulation goes unrecorded or unpunished. 

Many suspect President Jokowi exercised his power to help the PSI bring in more votes. He expressed confidence that the party, under his youngest son, would qualify for the House. Speaking to the media before his departure to Melbourne on Monday, Jokowi suggested that the public seek explanations about the alleged fraud from the KPU and the PSI.

The public suspicion is understandable, as Jokowi, through his cawe-cawe (interference), helped Prabowo and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who is Jokowi’s eldest son, dominate the presidential election.

And such suspicions are not without strong evidence, counter to what some high-ranking government officials have contended. Those who doubt the integrity of the election have produced large amounts of data to back up their arguments and deserve to be taken seriously.

The KPU and Bawaslu should stop looking down on critics as if they know nothing about data collection or processing. The two state institutions should open the election data to the public and let them verify it themselves.

The public deserves the opportunity to monitor for any irregularities in the electoral process. The government, the KPU and Bawaslu share the responsibility to disprove the allegations of fraud in a transparent and credible manner.