Jakarta – A final tally of most votes in Indonesia's presidential election has confirmed ex-general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the winner, the election authority said yesterday, a day before the official results were to be announced.
The Indonesian General Election Commission completed a manual count of district vote tallies from 25 of the country's 32 provinces on late Saturday, commission member Valina Singka Subekti told AFP.
Of them, the results of four provinces still needed re-checking, while the count for the remaining seven provinces was to be finalised yesterday, she said.
A partially completed electronic vote count has already shown Mr Bambang and his running mate to be the winners of the July 5 poll, with incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri in second place.
The electronic count has tallied the votes of nearly 70 per cent of registered voters, suggesting this will be the level of voter turnout.
The commission is scheduled to announce today the final official results of the election, the country's first direct presidential poll.
The electronic vote count found Mr Bambang, who resigned from Ms Megawati's Cabinet as security minister before the vote, had nearly 34 per cent of the ballots and Ms Megawati had just over 26 per cent. In third place is Mr Bambang's former boss, retired general Wiranto, with 22 per cent.
With no one looking set to get 50 per cent, the top two candidates are likely to go into a runoff vote due in September.
Mr Wiranto's camp refused to endorse the results finalised on Saturday, alleging fraud in the voting and ballot-counting processes, Ms Subekti said.
Mr Wiranto, a former military chief who stood for Indonesia's largest party, Golkar, said on Thursday the election has been riddled by flaws and violations.
He demanded the electoral commission publicly list all the alleged violations of elections laws that had taken place.
A total of 39 polling stations opened for six hours yesterday for a repeat vote at the sprawling Al-Zaytun Muslim boarding school in West Java's Indramayu district, where vote rigging had allegedly taken place, officials said.
The number of voters registered at the school for the July poll was more than double the number registered there for the April legislative election and almost all of the voters voted for Wiranto, officials have said.
The electoral commission said thousands of voters had been bussed in from Jakarta, many on military vehicles. But not a single voter showed up yesterday until the polling stations closed, said General Election Commission member Anas Urbaningrum, who monitored the poll repeat at Al- Zaytun.