Jakarta – The General Elections Commission (KPU) has reported fake news propagators to the police after misinformation about seven containers of cast ballots from China for presidential candidate pair Joko Widodo-Ma'ruf Amin caused uproar over the internet.
"It was reported to the Cyber Crime Police and we were about to report it to the National Police," KPU commisioner Ilham Saputra said on Thursday as quoted by Antara.
He said that on Wednesday evening until early Thursday, the KPU and the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) went to Tanjung Priok Port in North Jakarta in response to a rumor that the ballot containers were located there.
"After checking, we confirmed that the information was incorrect. There were no containers of cast ballots," he said.
KPU chairman Arief Budiman also asked the police to track and arrest people who had spread the false information. "People who disturbed our elections must be arrested, we will fight for it," Arief said.Ilham said the KPU had not started printing ballots yet. The commission will start printing ballots in mid-January.
Indonesia will have 192.84 million people on the electoral roll for the 2019 simultaneous legislative and presidential elections, according to the final voter list.
The 192.84 million consists of 190.8 million domestic voters and 2 million overseas voters, an increase of about 2 million from the final voter list in the 2014 general election. The number of men and women voters is roughly equal, at around 95 million each.
The commission noted that they had distributed 4,060,079 ballot boxes and 2,115,899 voting booths across the country as of December. (ggq/evi)