PKB Asks Bawaslu To Take Firm Position In Investigating PSI's Voice Surge

Deputy Secretary General of the National Awakening Party (PKB) Syaiful Huda (DOK VOI/Diah Ayu)

JAKARTA - Deputy Secretary General of the National Awakening Party (PKB) Syaiful Huda urged the Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) to trace the surge in PSI votes in the 2024 Legislative Election in the KPU Recapitulation Information System (Sirekap). Huda asked Bawaslu to work to hinder efforts to manipulate and transfer the votes of any political party in the ongoing tiered vote recapitulation process. "We ask Bawaslu to take a firm stance on mitigation related to this surge in votes. Is there any? There are facts on the ground. Therefore, we ask Bawaslu to take a firm stance," said Huda at the PKB DPP office, Cikini, Central Jakarta, Monday, March 4. Huda suggested that Bawaslu immediately execute the search for alleged vote inflating at each polling station (TPS) without having to wait for a national recapitulation. On the one hand, Huda asked the KPU to provide space in the mechanism for opening ballot boxes to re-check in sub-district-level recapitulation. "We give Bawaslu space to carry out mitigation to recommend when there are findings of inflating votes to be immediately executed in their respective regions. It is not brought to the plenary level of the province to the central level," explained Huda. The general election drama is still continuing. Currently, the public has been surprised by the anomaly in the votes acquired by the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) which suddenly jumped. On Sunday, March 3, PSI's vote was at 3.13 percent or 2,403,367 votes. The number of party votes led by Kaesang Pangarep gained attention because it experienced a significant increase in just one day, after previously only at around 2.8 percent. Thus, PSI only needs less than one percent of the vote, to be precise 0.87 percent of the vote, to reach the four percent parliamentary threshold. If successful in reaching the threshold, then for the first time the party led by President Joko Widodo's youngest son can occupy the DPR seat in Senayan. The surge in votes experienced by PSI is in the spotlight. There are allegations of vote inflating for this ‘ young ’ party. This suspicion arose because there was a difference in PSI's vote acquisition between the KPU Sirekap and the C1 Plano model form occurred in a number of polling stations.

Realizing that the party he built became a public discussion, PSI Deputy Chairman of the Board of Trustees Grace Natalie asked all parties to wait for the final results from the KPU. He emphasized that currently the recapitulation of votes is still ongoing. "We'll just wait for the results of the final calculation of the KPU. Don't lead an opinion that misleads the public. What's unnatural is if there are parties who try to lead opinions by questioning this," Grace said in a written statement.