TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Former presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto has chosen the Constitutional Court (MK) as his last battlefield.
He will reportedly file a lawsuit against the General Elections Commission’s (KPU) final vote tally of the presidential elections. Although the move is a legal option Prabowo-Hatta Rajasa pair, it will be to no avail and will not give a significant impact to the changes of the number of votes.
In fact, Prabowo Subianto-Hatta Rajasa ticket has clearly lost the election, with the margin of 8.4 million of votes from Joko Widodo-Jusuf Kalla. Therefore, Prabowo camp must accept the defeat graciously.
Filing a lawsuit against the KPU with unfounded accusations will only worsen their image. The public will laugh at them and the Constitutional Court will also reject the lawsuit.
Prabowo said that he withdrew from the presidential election hours before KPU finalized vote tally. At that time, he and his pair Hatta Rajasa had already lost from Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla pair.
The announcement was attended by a number of headers of political parties aligned in his coalition, except Hatta Rajasa. It was then followed by walkouts done by witnesses from Prabowo camp from vote the ongoing counting process at the General Election Commission.
This move was initially seen as Prabowo’s withdrawal from the Presidential election, a move that has a legal consequence because Prabowo cannot file a lawsuit to the Constitutional Court. However, his team lately announced that Prabowo only withdrew from vote counting at the KPU, not from the election.
What happened next is that Prabowo is said to bring the case to the Constitutional Court.
If Prabowo goes ahead with the plan to file a lawsuit to MK, he has to provide convincing evidence. So far, a number of reasons that Prabowo and his team brought have been rejected by KPU. It is perceived that the Prabowo camps are only looking for excuses because all the irregularities that they claim have been made should have been directly processed in every stage of the election, starting from polling stations (TPS), sub-district/village level, district level, up until the provincial level.
As it turned out, most of those objections were never reported and those that have been reported have also been settled by KPU.
Several days after voting, one of the members of Prabowo-Hatta Rajasa campaign team even applauded the election system run by KPU.
The voting process and manual vote counting process in the presidential election gave no room for irregularities because all the process were done from the smallest unit to the biggest unit: polling stations, district level, to provincial level.
Any irregularities that were made, no matter how significant they are, can be detected and anticipated - be it by the election committee, the witnesses, or the general public.
Besides, the recapitulation documents, known as C1 form was not only kept by KPU, but also by witnesses and the official Election Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu).
Votes only have two pairs of presidential and vice presidential candidates so that the accuracy level of the vote tally was quite high.
What must be applauded is that KPU also uploaded the as C1 form at polling stations level, which reach half a million, to the Internet, so the public can together supervise, check, and recapitulate the votes. This had made the accusation that a massive, structured and systematic irregularities in the form of 52,000 invalid CI forms-which is equal to 25 million of votes-was immediately known as an unfounded accusation.
Taking into account the transparent KPU recapitulation system, the Constitutional Court should be able to process the lawsuit filed by the Prabowo camps quickly. This is of great importance to avoid vacuum of power because President Yudhoyono’s administration that will come to an end in October this year.
If Prabowo continues to pay no heed to the ruling of the Constitutional Court, the people will surely be furious. They will take to the street in a people's power movement, just like what happened during Soeharto’s era.
It will be better if political parties supporting Prabowo’s coalition withdraw from the coalition if they are lured to make unconstitutional moves.
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