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Bawaslu rejects Prabowo team's report on 'systematic' cheating

Source
Jakarta Post - May 20, 2019

Jakarta – The Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) has rejected a report filed by the Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga Uno campaign team alleging that the Joko "Jokowi" Widodo-Ma'ruf Amin ticket used vote-buying tactics to persuade civil servants to vote for it.

"We declare that the report alleging structured, systematic and massive campaign violations has been rejected," Bawaslu head Abhan said during a pretrial hearing on Monday in Jakarta, as quoted by Antara.

Bawaslu said that it had declined to follow up on the report because of a lack of evidence.

The Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team had cited printed online news reports as evidence, which according to Bawaslu failed to fulfill its "systematic" criteria.

A member of the Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign team, Dian Fatwa of the National Mandate Party (PAN), said that Bawaslu's decision was "strange" and "unfair".

"We used the news regarding Government Regulation no. 15/2019 on pay raises for state civil servants as evidence," she said in a statement, referring to a regulation issued on March 13, which was within the campaign period.

"This was vote-buying. What is the difference between this and legislative candidates giving out money and food, or even promising voters they can go on umrah [minor haj]?" she added.

She said that such a move was made possible by Jokowi's incumbent status and cited news reports saying that the regulation had helped boost the electability of the Jokowi-Ma'ruf ticket, which the team had also filed as evidence with Bawaslu.

The team also pointed to Government Regulation No. 11/2019 on pay raises for village officials signed on February 28 as evidence and had prepared a number of state officials as witnesses.

Dian said Bawaslu's decision was unfair as the agency did not bother questioning witnesses prepared by her team and questioned the agency's credibility. (ars)

Source: https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/05/20/bawaslu-rejects-prabowo-teams-report-on-systematic-cheating.html

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