Joko Widodo, governor of Jakarta and presidential candidate, poses for photographs before casting his ballot paper at a polling station during the presidential election in Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 9, 2014.

Indonesian presidential candidate Joko Widodo is leading Prabowo Subianto with more than two-thirds of votes tallied from last week’s election.

Widodo, known as Jokowi, secured 52.8 percent of the 106.5 million votes counted as of yesterday, with Prabowo on 47.1 percent, according to Kawalpemilu.org, a website that tracks actual results at polling stations that are uploaded to the General Elections Commission website. Most unofficial partial vote counts by survey companies show Jokowi with a 2-6 percentage point lead before official results due by July 22.

Indonesia is experiencing its first tight presidential race since direct elections for the post started a decade ago, with the outcome placing Asia’s fifth largest economy under the leadership of Jakarta Governor Jokowi, 53, or ex-general Prabowo, 62. A margin of four percentage points suggests Jokowi will maintain his advantage and make it hard to contest the results in court, said Andrinof Chaniago, a political analyst.

“Above three percent is enough to concede defeat,” Chaniago, from the University of Indonesia near Jakarta, said yesterday by phone, speaking of Prabowo. “If there are little disputes in the poll booths, it won’t change the result.”

Prabowo’s coalition will contest the official result in the constitutional court, the country’s highest, if its legal team gathers the evidence to do so, he told reporters July 14. A challenge would mean another month of uncertainty for voters and investors in the world’s third-largest democracy.
Java

On Java island, where over half of Indonesians live, Jokowi leads in Jakarta, East Java and Central Java, while Prabowo is in front in West Java and Banten provinces, according to data compiled by Kawalpemilu. West Java is Indonesia’s most populous province with 43 million people.

Kawalpemilu uses 700 volunteers to input data and the site is updated every 10 minutes, Metro TV reported on its website yesterday, citing founder Ainun Najib, who it said is a graduate of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

Other regions where Jokowi leads include Kalimantan and most of Sulawesi island, while Prabowo leads in Aceh, West Sumatra and the Maluku or Spice Islands, according to Kawalpemilu.

Before the election commission can release official results it must tally the ballots of the forecast 75 percent of the 190 million eligible voters who turned out. The results are hauled from polling stations on 900 inhabited islands in the Southeast Asian archipelago, which would stretch from New York to Alaska, to regional centers. While counting at local booths is done publicly -- those figures form the basis of poll company surveys -- adding the results up is done in secret.

Both candidates in their victory speeches called on supporters to guard against attempts to manipulate the tally, while outgoing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono urged supporters on both sides to remain calm following the vote.

Voters have been photographing results at local booths and posting the pictures on the Internet, in a grassroots monitoring effort to help ensure the count is fair, the Jakarta Globe reported last week.

To contact the reporters on this story: Rieka Rahadiana in Jakarta at rrahadiana@bloomberg.net; Berni Moestafa in Jakarta at bmoestafa@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rosalind Mathieson at rmathieson3@bloomberg.net Dick Schumacher

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