Jakarta. The General Election Commission (KPU) told gubernatorial candidates in Jakarta on Thursday to refrain from claiming victory too early, saying the official tally is still weeks away from being announced.

The statement came after Pramono Anung and his running mate Rano Karno declared victory in Wednesday’s election, claiming to have secured 50.07 percent of the vote.

While quick counts by reputable pollsters indicated that Pramono was ahead by two digits from closest rival Ridwan Kamil, the 50 percent mark remains within the margin of error and one research firm projected his tally at a little above 49 percent of the vote.

Jakarta is the only province that requires the elected governor to win more than 50 percent of the vote or a runoff is held between the top two candidates.

"There could be different versions about vote tallies among candidates number one, two, and three, but of course, the valid version is the one coming from the KPU,” said Wahyu Dinata, chairman of the KPU’s Jakarta branch.

He reminded all candidates that the official tally will be announced on December 16 at the latest following a phased counting process across the district, municipal, and provincial levels.

The whole counting process will last until December 9 to be followed by the certification procedure, Wahyu said.

All documented tallies known as “C documents” from every polling booth will be published by the KPU website for public views, Wahyu said, adding that the entire 14,835 C documents have now been uploaded to the recapitulation app.

"We allow everyone to take the initiative to manually count the results based on our published data as part of the public controlling mechanism. But still, we have to count the votes in stages to anticipate corrections at the district level," Wahyu explained.

Corrections sometimes occurred due to typos or errors in the data reading device that caused discrepancies between the actual result and what is published in the digital format.

The previous gubernatorial election in Jakarta in 2017 required a runoff after three candidates failed to win above 50 percent of the vote in the first round.

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