The easy way to win an election

Kanis Dursin, Jakarta

Politicians, public figures or anyone aspiring for a public office may now have a new way of achieving their ambitions -- through a legal battle in court.

The requirements are simple and reasonably easy to meet. First, get a political party to nominate you; secondly, contest the election result if you happen to loose and; thirdly, enlist people who have enough guts to testify (or perhaps to lie) under oath that your rivals have robbed you of your election victory either by illegally inflating their vote tally or preventing your supporters from casting their votes.

Do not worry about the validity of their testimonies; the honorable judges will not bother to verify them. The fact that the testimonies are given under oath means they must be true.

As for you supporters who did not cast their votes, the judges will take care of them. Once you have submitted "all of the requirements", just sit back and wait for your inauguration.

This seems to be the message the West Java High Court judges sent out on Aug. 4 when they annulled the victory of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and its torchbearer candidate Nur Mahmudi Ismail in the Depok mayoral election and declared rival Badrul Kamal of the Golkar Party as the winner.

Badrul, according to the Depok General Elections Commission (KPUD Depok), lost to Nur Mahmudi by almost 26,000 votes. However, as expected, Badrul, who was Depok mayor from 2000 to 2005, contested the result in the West Java High Court.

After almost a month of court hearings, instead of the only two weeks allowed under the regional administration law, the judges handed down their final and binding verdict that Badrul, whose son was recently married to West Java Governor Danny Setiawan's daughter, won the election by almost 65,000 votes.

How did the judges count the ballots? Judges hearing the electoral dispute accepted all claims by Badrul and Golkar that around 65,000 of their supporters were unable to cast their votes and that Nur Mahmudi's tally had been inflated. The claims were backed up by testimonies of 11 witnesses Badrul and Golkar presented to the West Java High Court.

The judges said, bizarrely, that they accepted the testimonies at face value because they were given under oath and so must be true. The result was that Badrul was declared to have won, with 269,551 votes against Nur Mahmudi's 204,828.

On July 5, the KPUD Depok had declared Nur Mahmudi the winner with 232,610 votes, compared to Badrul's tally of 206,781. About 700,000 of more than one million eligible voters were believed to have taken part in Depok's first direct mayoral election.

The trouble is that the claims were never properly verified and thus their validity remains extremely doubtful. Some of the witnesses presented by Badrul and Golkar, for example, told the court that they were aware of alleged vote-rigging by PKS staff only when they were told so by Golkar members.

Only one witness from the KPUD Depok was presented to counter Badrul and Golkar's claims, while no witnesses from the PKS were called to allow the party to present its side.

Even if the claims that around 60,000 supporters of Badrul and Golkar did not cast their votes were true, their votes should not have been automatically added to Badrul's tally as the supporters were neither registered as legitimate voters for the Depok selection nor had cast their votes. By adding the votes to Badrul's tally, the judges effectively registered the voters and punched the ballots -- all on Badrul's behalf.

Needless to say that the verdict, so far the first a high court which has overturned the result of an election, dealt a severe blow to the PKS as it denied the party the highest public office in one of its traditional strongholds.

Manned by young Muslim intellectuals, the PKS has always campaigned for fair, clean and transparent government and winning the Depok mayoral seat would have tested PKS members, giving the public the chance to see whether they could resist the illegitimate temptations of power and clean up the Depok municipality.

As it has become increasingly clear that the PKS will not win the top post in Depok, the party and the public at large may have to wait for next elections to see whether the PKS can practice what it preaches.

In the meantime, the PKS has to work hard to change its image tarnished by a court pronouncement that it illegally increased the votes for Nur Mahmudi in the election. The verdict, although based on unverified and highly questionable claims, if left to stand suggests the party is no different from other corrupt and power-hungry groups.

Meanwhile, for those that do not even pretend to have any scruples in their quest for power, the verdict is likely to present a golden opportunity to achieve their ambitions in a cost-efficient manner. After all, dealing with a few judges is always easier than wooing hundreds of thousands or even millions of voters to win an election. If this is the case, the country's fledging democracy is truly in danger.

The author is a staff writer for The Jakarta Post.