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Marsudi Wahyu Kisworo as expert for the KPU giving statement in the fourth hearing of the 2019 presidential election results dispute case on Thursday (20/6) in the Courtroom of the Constitutional Court. Photo by Humas MK/Ifa.

JAKARTA, Public Relations of the Constitutional Court—The vote count information system (Situng) was design for transparency so that the public can monitor the tiered vote counting system. This was conveyed by Marsudi Wahyu Kisworo as expert presented by the General Elections Commission (KPU) (Respondent) in the follow-up hearing of the 2019 presidential election results dispute (PHPU) case on Thursday afternoon (20/6/2019).

The KPU’s IT expert said that before the public’s attention was focused on the KPU’s Situng in this 2019 presidential election, Situng has undergone a long journey since 2003 and is one of the 19 existing electoral applications. The objective of the creation of Situng is to facilitate the people to watch over the implementation of democracy. Therefore, Marsudi added, in case of any error on Situng, the C1 forms would be corrected in tiered manual calculations. “If there are any discrepancies on Situng, the correct [results] will be the tiered manual [calculations],” Marsudi said before Constitutional Justice Wahiduddin Adams who presided over the examination hearing.

Irregular Patterns

Marsudi illustrated the efforts to modify the results displayed by the KPU’s Situng by using the data on the Situng page on April 25, 2019. Based on his observations, Marsudi found that any addition or reduction of votes impacted both candidate pairs. In addition, using the skyscraper testing method, he found irregular patterns of changes in the vote tally. There were no identical patterns on the vote tally, even up to district/municipal level.

“There were no regular patterns, including [after] statistical tests were done. Those were random numbers,” said the senior professional engineer (IPU).

Not only observing the KPU announcement after the 2019 presidential election, Marsudi also observed the final Situng data by comparing them with data from the Kawal Pemilu website on June 10, 2019. From his observation, Marsudi found discrepancies between the tally on the Situng page and the Kawal Pemilu page, albeit insignificant.

The Kawal Pemilu website published the tabulation from the recapitulation results of scanned C1 forms for the 2014 presidential election generated from the KPU website. Through the Kawal Pemilu website, Marsudi admitted, he accessed sufficiently credible data to analyze the calculation issues of the 2019 presidential election.

According to Marsudi, there was a possibility on the Situng of three types of errors, in that there was numerical data without C1 scans, which almost reached 40%, but which did not impact the tabulation. With the finding of weaknesses in the KPU’s Situng, Marsudi recommended that in the future the KPU IT team be able to display both validated and non-validated data from the tabulation in order to avoid suspicions and electoral violations in the future.

Cannot be Hacked

In response to the claim of hacked Situng page, which was deemed not secure enough and led to the assumption of miscalculations, Marsudi explained that in addition to the Situng tabulation on the webpage, the KPU has data that can only be accessed internally and are stored in three locations: in the KPU’s server and in two other confidential servers, for the purpose of security.

“So, the Situng on the KPU’s website was designed to be easily accessible, and the data can even be extracted on Excel [software] and there is no need for robot [to extract] the C1 forms on the page. And even if [hacked], the data on the Situng page will be refreshed every 15 minutes and the data on the Situng will remain secure as long as nobody manipulated the data entry,” Marsudi explained before the court presided over by Chief Justice Anwar Usman.

Before concluding the session, Justice Anwar validated the evidence submitted by the KPU (Respondent). He informed that the next hearing will commence on Friday, June 21, 2019 at 09.00 WIB to hear the witnesses and experts presented by Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidate Pair Joko Widodo-Ma’ruf Amin (Relevant Party) as well as to validate the evidence from the Relevant Party and from the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu). (Sri Pujianti/NRA/Yuniar Widiastuti)

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