2 parallel vote count sites attacked

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Two volunteer-based parallel count of votes cast during Indonesia’s highly divisive presidential election were targeted by hackers over the past two days. 

Kawal Pemilu and Kawal Suara, websites both initiated by private individuals, have been tallying votes listed on the C1 forms – tabulation sheets from each polling center – that have been uploaded on the General Election Commission (KPU) website. (READ: ‘Crowd-counting’ Indonesia’s votes) 

On Wednesday, July 16, Kawal Suara – which allows volunteers to encode vote tallies shown in the scanned C1 forms – suffered a “flood” of attacks.

“There were thousands of intentionally wrong data entries to our server. Some were definitely generated by automated scripts,” Kawal Suara founder Reza Lesmana told Rappler, adding that the attack from 2-4pm caused the vote percentage to shift around 1%.

“However, the volunteers noticed this and they started rallying to counter the attack by verifying the false entries,” Reza said. “So most of the thousands of false entries got invalidated pretty soon. Only couple of hours later, the vote percentage was back to the ‘normal’ position.”

The “normal” position shows Jakarta Governor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and running mate Jusuf Kalla leading with over 52-53% of the vote with just under 50% of the C1 forms tallied. This has been relatively consistent since the site was launched on Saturday.

Kawal Pemilu, on the other hand, launched by Ainun Najib, was attacked by “hundreds” of hackers also on Wednesday afternoon, according to Tempo. The site has volunteers encode the C1 forms and just displays the tally. The attacks led to the site being inaccessible for a few hours on Thursday. 

By late Thursday, the site was back up, with its latest tally of 99.40% of the available C1 forms showing Jokowi and Kalla leading with 52.80% of the votes. 

Both sites have since increased their security to prevent future attacks. 

“Not everyone will be satisfied with a transparent system like this. Though it was hacked, the public already knows the result,” Pramono Anung, a senior politician from Jokowi’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), told Kompas on Thursday.

KPU will announce its official result on Tuesday, July 22. – Rappler.com