Besides votes, Indonesians can now ‘crowdcheck’ election appeal documents

Prabowo Subianto

Although the official voting tally has been announced with Joko Widodo being proclaimed the new president elect, Indonesia’s presidential race is not over yet. Rival Prabowo Subianto has been adamant that the whole election system was a “massive, structured, and systematic fraud”. Losing by nearly 8.5 million votes, Subianto’s team finally submitted their appeal to challenge the result in Indonesia’s constitutional court (MK). This time, MK also released the appeal documents under the open government initiative for all to see.

Subianto first submitted the documents to the court on July 25th. Citizens can download two versions, the original and a revised copy, directly on MK’s website. Turns out the documents have a lot of typos and inaccurate data, and people are having a blast by pointing them out online.

Some examples of mistakes include wrong bullet numbers, wrong tally numbers, and even a case of the header saying one thing and the body text saying another. One sentence even says that the systemic fraud in Indonesian province West Papua helped Subianto achieve a win there. Either they were being truthful or that’s a huge typo in such an important document.

See: Silicon Valley coder wants to defend Indonesia’s democracy with election vote counter and neat data visualizations

Besides making headlines, all the clumsiness were documented by users in online forum Kaskus. Make no mistake, this document matters to Indonesia’s future as MK will use it as a key consideration to accept or reject Subianto’s claims. And now citizens can scrutinize the documents from their homes.

Previously, the General Elections Commission released vote tally documents in Indonesia under the open government initiative. It was met with huge support as many individuals joined in to count the tallies.