Prabowo Subianto, a retired Indonesian Army general, denounced the result of the country’s presidential election and withdrew his candidacy.

Publish Date July 22, 2014. Image CreditAdi Weda/European Pressphoto Agency

Ex-General to Challenge Results in Indonesia Election

International New York Times | 23 July 2014

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Prabowo Subianto, the former army general who was declared the loser in Indonesia’s emotionally charged presidential election, will appeal the results to the country’s Constitutional Court, claiming that there were widespread irregularities in the voting, senior advisers to his campaign said Wednesday.

Indonesia’s General Elections Commission announced Tuesday night that Joko Widodo, the populist governor of Jakarta, had beaten Mr. Prabowo in the July 9 election by a margin of more than eight million votes, with 53 percent of the vote to Mr. Prabowo’s 47 percent.

Mr. Prabowo rejected the results hours before they were even announced and briefly threatened to withdraw his candidacy. His campaign said that irregularities at 52,000 polling stations, both in the casting of ballots and in the counting process, had called 21 million votes into question.

Nearly 135 million Indonesians voted at more than 480,000 polling stations during the hotly contested election, in which voters chose a new president for the first time in 10 years.

Mr. Prabowo’s decision to appeal the results had been widely expected, but election and constitutional law experts said it was doubtful that the Constitutional Court would rule in his favor.

The court, which has the sole authority to order recounts or new voting at the provincial level and below, has rejected every legal challenge to a presidential election result since the country began holding direct polls for president in 2004.

At a news conference Wednesday in Jakarta, Mr. Prabowo’s advisers said election commission officials had dismissed their requests to investigate claims that the number of people who voted at tens of thousands of polling stations far exceeded the number of names on the voter rolls. They also claimed that Mr. Joko had mysteriously garnered an additional 490,000 votes in West Java Province, a key election battleground, during the vote tabulation process.

“The indication of massive fraud and widespread irregularities is overwhelming,” said Tantowi Yahya, a spokesman for Mr. Prabowo’s campaign.

Hashim Djojohadikusumo, Mr. Prabowo’s brother and chief adviser, said Mr. Prabowo would ask the Constitutional Court to order the elections commission to conduct recounts or new voting at the 52,000 polling stations identified by his campaign. “I think that’s the only way we would accept the result,” Mr. Hashim said.

Indonesian president-elect Joko Widodo in Jakarta on Wednesday. Credit Dita Alangkara/Associated Press

Mr. Hashim said the campaign did not know whether the 21 million ballots it considered suspect tended to benefit one candidate or the other.

Officials with the elections commission could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday, but they had previously rejected assertions by the Prabowo campaign that there were widespread irregularities in the election.

Refly Harun, a constitutional law expert and former legal adviser to the Constitutional Court, said Wednesday that he was “99 percent certain” that the justices would rule against Mr. Prabowo.

“We don’t know who people voted for,” he said. “If they are saying that the irregularities gave a benefit to Joko Widodo, they would have to prove that.”

Muhammad Qodari, executive director of Indo Barometer, a polling firm, said it would be difficult for Mr. Prabowo to persuade the Constitutional Court to step in given Mr. Joko’s substantial margin of victory, and because Indonesian organizations that monitored the election had not reported systemic irregularities.

“I don’t think he could present any compelling proof that would trigger revoting at 52,000 polling stations,” Mr. Muhammad said. “I’m very skeptical that he has any strong evidence.”

Mr. Joko, 53, is scheduled to be sworn in on Oct. 20, completing a phenomenal political rise from modest beginnings to the presidency of the world’s fourth most populous nation. Mr. Prabowo, 62, was a son-in-law of Suharto, the authoritarian president who was forced to resign in 1998 after 32 years in power.