Jakarta – The Constitutional Court has rejected a claim by losing presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto and running mate Sandiaga Uno that the Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and Ma'ruf Amin ticket's call for its supporters to don white shirts while voting was some form of election violation.
The nine-judge bench of the court argued that the plaintiffs had failed to elaborate on the correlation between the call and the number of votes secured by the candidates.
"We find no proof indicating that the call had intimidated voters; nor did it affect the vote tally," Justice Arief Hidayat said.
In its petition to the court, the Prabowo-Sandiaga ticket claimed that the 2019 presidential election was marred by "structured, systematic and massive" fraud, alleging that the KPU had rigged the election and inflated Jokowi and Ma'ruf's tally by about 22 million votes.
The KPU named Jokowi and Ma'ruf the winners of April's presidential race, with the pair gaining 55.5 percent of the vote against Prabowo and Sandiaga's 44.5 percent.
As of Thursday afternoon, the reading of the court's final ruling over the presidential election dispute was still going on. (ars)