The General Elections Commission (KPU) has decided not to present any fact witnesses during the presidential election litigation at the Constitutional Court (MK), as they believe that the plaintiff’s factual and expert witnesses had not put forward well-prepared arguments to support their claims. The KPU has thus decided to present only expert witnesses.
JAKARTA, KOMPAS — The General Elections Commission (KPU), the defendant in the lawsuit disputing the results of the 2019 presidential election, said it believed that the factual and expert witnesses did not present statements that supported the plaintiff’s (Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno camp) claims of widespread election fraud. The KPU thus decided not to present any fact witnesses to the court, and presented only expert witnesses.
In the hearing on Thursday (20/6/2019), the KPU presented IT and computer expert Marsudi Wahyu Kisworo and a written statement from state administrative law expert Riawan Tjandra to the Constitutional Court.
The KPU had initially considered presenting fact witnesses. The court allows the defendant to present up to 15 fact witnesses and two expert witnesses. However, the KPU eventually decided not to present any fact witnesses this following the cross-examination of the plaintiff’s witnesses from Wednesday to 5 a.m. on Thursday. The plaintiff had planned to present 15 fact witnesses and two expert witnesses, but one witness declined to testify.
On Thursday, Marsudi testified on the KPU’s vote tabulation (real count) system, called Situng. The plaintiff claims that the system was manipulated to increase the number of votes for the Joko Widodo-Ma’ruf Amin camp at the expense of Prabowo-Sandiaga.
Marsudi said that as a system, the Situng was different from the web page that displayed the official vote tally. “The Situng [tally] displayed on the KPU’s website is a mere reflection of the actual Situng system,” he said.
The actual Situng existed on the KPU’s intranet, protected by cybersecurity measures. If hackers attempted to disrupt the Situng web page, only the web page would be affected. The original data would remain unaffected on the KPU’s intranet. Once the disruption was resolved, the real data from the KPU’s intranet would replace the manipulated data on the Situng web page.
Situng system
Furthermore, the Situng was never intended to be the basis for determining the election winner. It was merely a form of transparency. The election winner was determined through manual tabulation and a tiered recapitulation.
“Are data inputting errors impossible on the Situng?” Prabowo-Sandiaga lawyer Luthfi Yazid asked Marsudi.
Marsudi responded that human error might lead to data inputting errors. However, such errors were found in the vote tabulation of both candidate pairs. No consistent pattern was found that votes were “stolen” from Prabowo-Sandiaga and “given” to Jokowi-Amin.
During an earlier hearing on Thursday, an expert witness for the plaintiff, Jaswar Koto, testified that such a consistent pattern existed.
In his testimony during a hearing on Wednesday evening, plaintiff’s witness Hermansyah said that there were gaps in the Situng’s data inputting process that might make the system vulnerable to hacking by “intruders”. This, he said, showed that the Situng was vulnerable to hacking.
Another court session heard from Rahmadsyah, the head of the Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign secretariat for Batu Bara regency, North Sumatra, who is under city arrest as a defendant in a hate speech case. During his cross-examination by the Jokowi-Amin legal team, Rahmadsyah responded that he had traveled to Jakarta without permission from the prosecutor’s office. Instead, he only possessed a letter stating that he was accompanying his parents, who were seeking medical treatment.
Claims rejected
Regarding its decision not to present any fact witness, KPU chair Arief Budirman said that the decision was made based on developments in the election litigation and reviewing the testimonies of fact and expert witnesses for the plaintiff. The KPU said that the witnesses’ statements did not support the plaintiff’s claims.
“The responses the plaintiff’s fact and expert witnesses gave to our questions [in previous hearings] explained what we want to explain. So we decided not to present any witnesses,” said Arief.
KPU commissioner Hasyim Asy’ari said that the witnesses’ testimonies could not prove the plaintiff’s claims of fraud. “For instance, the witnesses said that fraud was committed in the final voters list [DPT] in certain regions. However, as it turned out, Prabowo-Sandiaga won in those regions. This disproves their claim of fraud,” he said.
The KPU would only present expert witnesses to testify against the plaintiff’s claims of irregularities in the vote count and the statuses of state-owned enterprises.
Prabowo-Sandiaga claims that Ma’ruf Amin should have been deemed ineligible to contest the presidential election because Amin held a position at a state-owned enterprise. (REK/TAM/MTK