Jakarta – The General Elections Commission (KPU) announced late Saturday the final results of the April 9 legislative elections, with around 40 percent of the more than 171 million registered voters abstaining or casting invalid ballots.
Invalid votes accounted for 17,488,581, or 10 percent, of the counted votes, while the number of people who chose not to vote was 49,677,076, or 30 percent of the overall registered voters. This does not include the millions of eligible voters who were allegedly not registered.
The good news was that the number of invalid votes were far less than earlier estimates reaching 40 percent, based on several simulations.
Several political parties have said they will legally challenge the final election result and also the controversial final eligible voters' list.
The final count of 104,099,785 valid votes confirmed the results of quick counts by a number of pollsters.
As expected, the final outcome shows President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democratic Party in the lead, garnering more than 21.7 million, or 20 percent, of the votes.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla's Golkar Party came in second with 14.45 percent, followed by former president Megawati Soekarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with 14.03 percent.
The final results were announced on time, despite many observers and activists earlier doubting the KPU's ability to meet the May 9 deadline.
Despite a slew of objections from party witnesses, the commission decided the manual count results were valid, but with several notes. "Despite various data inaccuracies, the KPU will stick to its decision," said KPU member I Gusti Putu Artha.
South Nias regency in North Sumatra province was the last electoral district verified by the KPU, despite protests from party witnesses over alleged vote rigging there.
The KPU also managed to resolve disputes over different vote tallies garnered by legislative candidates in West Halmahera and North Halmahera regencies, North Maluku, by ordering a vote recount.
Putu admitted the main problem with the manual vote count was data inconsistencies – between the KPU, local election bodies, the Elections Supervisory Body (Bawaslu) and political parties – at every level of the vote count, from polling booths to the provincial level. "Errors in the data entry process, both digital and manual, are the cause of the inconsistencies," he said. (fmb)