Prabowo-Gibran lead Indonesian presidential race, based on quick counts of sample votes

livus, 3 months ago

From the article:

Current defence minister Prabowo, who is a former special forces lieutenant-general, has been touted as the front-runner in various electability surveys.

Indonesian law states that a presidential candidate needs a simple majority – or more than 50 per cent – of the votes to win. They also need to attain at least 20 per cent of the votes in half of Indonesia’s 38 provinces.

If that does not happen, the top two pairs of candidates will enter a run-off vote in June, with the third pair eliminated.

Mr Prabowo, whose running mate Mr Gibran is President Joko Widodo’s son, has vowed to continue Mr Widodo’s development programmes and legacy projects, including the planned relocation of the administrative capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan.

Mr Ganjar has promised to improve the president’s policies in education and healthcare, while Mr Anies has said he would review and roll back some programmes such the capital relocation.

Millions of Indonesians cast their ballots earlier on Feb 14 to elect not only a president and a vice-president, but also parliamentary and local representatives. In the legislative poll, thousands of lawmaker hopefuls seek to fill 580 seats in the national Parliament known as the House of Representatives, and around 20,000 seats at the regional level.

These ballots will be first tallied at the local district levels before being recounted at the national level for both presidential and legislative elections.

Under Indonesia’s elections law, the vote counting process may take up to 35 days to be completed, given the large number of eligible voters of around 205 million and the vast territory. The General Elections Commission has said official results are expected to be released by March 20 at the latest.

Official results are not expected to differ significantly from quick count tallies...