BY EDWARD ASPINALL AND MARCUS MIETZNER, GUEST CONTRIBUTORS – 10 JULY 2014
POSTED IN: INDONESIA VOTES

Prabowo Subianto claims ‘victory’ at his campaign headquarters in Jakarta on Wednesday evening. (Photo: Reuters)

On the basis of these quick counts, Jokowi yesterday claimed victory in the election (though he used typically casual language in doing so) and he called on his followers to closely monitor the formal counting of ballots in the next two weeks. However, at the same time, four organisations produced quick counts of their own that showed a Prabowo Subianto victory, albeit by narrower margins.

On the basis of this smaller number of quick counts, Prabowo Subianto has also claimed victory. Consequently, Indonesia is now set for a period of significant political confusion, uncertainty, and even instability, in the weeks leading to the formal announcement of the results by the KPU on 22 July.

How can this confusion have arisen? We wish to be very clear that this is not a matter of a range of equally credible quick counts showing a wide range of potentially legitimate results. Rather, the confusion is part of Prabowo Subianto’s strategy to steal the election, a strategy that evidently has been long in the making. Reportedly, one of Prabowo’s chief campaign strategists, Rob Allyn, has been known not only for his expertise in negative campaigning but also for producing surveys which create the impression that an electorally weak candidate is competitive, and using the subsequent confusion among the electorate to manoeuvre this candidate into a more favourable position. Allyn has been known for this strategy in Mexican elections. It seems Indonesia is fertile ground for the same method.

Step 1. Muddy the statistical waters.

Over the last decade or so, as well as an array of highly professional survey institutes, it is widely recognized that many organisations have arisen that are willing to tailor their survey results to favour their clients, and even to falsify surveys altogether. They typically do so when producing voter surveys, in the belief that some Indonesian voters are more likely to back a winner and that falsely high survey result will thus boost a sponsor’s chance of being elected.

Though we have no direct evidence that the organisations producing the quick counts favouring Prabowo were paid to falsify their results, their track records give us every reason to be highly suspicious—indeed to be certain—that manipulation of some sort has taken place. For example, one of the organisations mentioned above, LSN (Lembaga Survei Nasional; National Survey Institute) has a consistent record of producing survey findings that show results for Prabowo and his Gerindra party that are much higher than the findings of established pollsters. As early as 2009, LSN predicted in the parliamentary elections then that Gerindra would get 15.6 percent of the votes—it eventually ended up with 4.5 percent. In the 2014 parliamentary elections, LSN issued a very early quick count even before polls had closed—stating that Gerindra would come first with 26.1 percent, obviously hoping that last-minute voters would bandwagon. At the end, Gerindra finished third with 11.8 percent. Two days before the presidential elections, LSN issued a poll that showed Prabowo leading by 9 percentage points—although other, credible pollsters had Jokowi leading by between 2 to 4 percent.

Puskaptis, another pollster whose quick count saw Prabowo ahead on the evening of 9 July, has a similarly questionable history. In 2013, the head of Puskatis, Husin Yazid, had to be rescued from an angry crowd protesting against his manipulation of a quick count in the gubernatorial elections in South Sumatra. JSI (Jaringan Suara Indonesia; Indonesia Vote Network), for its part, has almost no track record, except for falsely predicting Governor Fauzi Bowo’s victory against Jokowi in Jakarta in 2012, and for claiming in the same year that 64 percent of Indonesians thought that Prabowo was the most suitable candidate for the Indonesian presidency. Finally, IRC (Indonesian Research Center) is reportedly owned by Hary Tanoesoedibjo, a media tycoon aligned with Prabowo. In June 2014, IRC predicted that Prabowo would win the presidency against Jokowi with 48 to 43 percent—using a thus far unheard-of methodology: it combined the polling numbers of all presidential candidates into an index and redistributed them based on whether they now supported Prabowo or Jokowi. It is hard to think of a less professional approach to opinion polling.

It is unsurprising, then, that these organisations came to the quick count results that they published on 9 July. And it is equally telling that all these organisations released their findings on tvOne—the television channel owned by Prabowo ally Aburizal Bakrie which has produced blatantly pro-Prabowo coverage throughout the election. In the lead-up to the presidential elections, tvOne had signed an exclusive contract with Poltracking, a new but relatively reputable institution. On the morning of voting day, however, Poltracking was told by tvOne that other institutions would join the quick count coverage of the pro-Prabowo station. Knowing about the questionable reputation of these institutions, Poltracking resigned from the contract with tvOne at 10am on 9 July. It later announced a quick count result that, like other credible survey institutions, saw Jokowi as the winner. The others, as explained above, followed tvOne’s very obvious preference and published the quick counts that falsely declared Prabowo to have won.

Step 2. Steal the results.

Why produce fake quick results? Votes have already been cast, so the intention cannot be to influence voter behavior. The purpose is clear: to buy time and sow public confusion about the election result, while preparing other methods to produce a victory in the formal count.

There are two ways through which Prabowo could potentially win at this stage. The first would be to wait for the formal announcement of the result and then challenge it in the Constitutional Court. The margin of Jokowi’s victory, however, means that even if the Prabowo camp can find examples of maladministration in the count here and there—it will almost certainly be able to do this because Indonesian elections are far from flawless in their execution—it will not be able to overturn the result through a formal challenge. Jokowi’s current advantage is an estimated 6.5 million votes; thus, Prabowo would have to swing around 3.3 million votes to draw even with Jokowi or gain a slight lead. No Constitutional Court decision, whether on cases at the local or national level, has ever shifted this amount of votes from one candidate to another. In rare cases, the Court agreed to move a few hundred or few thousand votes—but nothing of this magnitude. Similarly, the Court has ordered re-votes in some cases, but mostly in individual voting stations or districts.

This leaves one other option: manipulation of the formal counting and vote tabulation process. We know from other Indonesian elections—most recently the April legislative election—that vote ‘trading’ in the counting process is widespread. Candidates can and do bribe election officials at every level—from the individual polling booths up through the various levels of village, subdistrict, district and then provincial level commissions that collate the results—to shift votes from one party or candidate to another, to enter votes ‘on behalf’ of voters that did not turn up at the booth, or engage in other forms of manipulation. In the April legislative elections, fraud was massive but likely had little effect on the overall share of the votes attained by different parties because candidates from all parties engaged in such practices in highly fragmented and uncoordinated patterns.

It will be unprecedented in Indonesia’s democratic experience for a candidate to try to steal the presidential result. But it is highly likely that Prabowo’s camp will make the attempt. Particularly vulnerable are areas (such as the island of Madura) where Prabowo supporters dominate local power structures and where Jokowi or his PDI-P had few scrutineers at the polling booths to record the results as they were counted (exit polls on voting day showed that Prabowo had observers at 88 percent of all voting stations, against Jokowi’s 83 percent). It’s also especially likely that such manipulation will occur in areas where governors are district heads are Prabowo supporters, and where they will be able to exert pressure on local officials to intervene in the count.

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Edward Aspinall & Marcus Mietzner conduct research on Indonesian politics at the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University’s College of Asia & the Pacific. They have been in Indonesia observing the 2014 legislative and presidential elections.

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About Edward Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner, Guest Contributors

Sumber : http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newman...wos-game-plan/