No, these posts do not show millions of ballots sent from China to rig this year’s Indonesian presidential election in favour of incumbent Joko Widodo
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on January 3, 2019 at 18:00
- Updated on January 4, 2019 at 03:59
- 4 min read
- By AFP Indonesia
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This post was shared more than 16,000 times in the first 13 hours after being published on January 2.
Its caption translates to: “New update. Seven containers from China containing ballots that had been cast for the ballot number one candidate have been discovered in Tanjung Priok port. Each of the containers contains 10 million ballots. So the total is 70 million casted ballots. The containers have been confiscated by Indonesian Navy officials and have been sent to the general election commission.”
Tanjung Priok is a port in Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta. Indonesia will hold a presidential election in April this year, which pits Widodo against his sole rival, Prabowo Subianto.
Widodo is officially number one on the ballot, according to the election commission’s website.
The post features an image of a blue container with the watermark of Waspada.co.id -- an online news outlet based in Medan, capital of Indonesia’s North Sumatra province.
This other post, which was shared more than 11,000 times in the first 15 hours after being posted on January 2, made a similar claim, although with different illustrations.
The false claims have appeared elsewhere online, including these reports here and here.
Reverse image searches found that the photos used in both of the false posts above were taken from earlier media reports.
The photo used in the first Facebook post was taken from this Waspada.co.id articled dated November 16, 2018, about the distribution of ballots for the coming election in North Sumatra province.
Below is a screenshot of the Waspada article.
Three images shared by the second post were sourced from various news reports about the 2017 elections for Jakarta’s governorship.
The links to the three articles are here, here and here.
Below are the snapshots of those articles.
The final image of the green boxes of paper was taken from an illustration of a stationery business advertisement posted in a local online marketplace.
Below is a snapshot of that advertisement.
Indonesian general elections commission (KPU) chairman Arif Budiman visited Tanjung Priok late on January 2 in response to the false claims and inspect the port. In a press briefing held after the operation and broadcast by local station Kompas TV, Budiman dismissed the claims. Below is Kompas’s Youtube broadcast of the press briefing.
At minute 48:12 of the clip, Budiman says: “Today we can confirm that, based on what we have been told by customs and excises officials, there is no information about the discovery of the claimed seven containers. That’s not true. It is also false that the containers were found by Indonesian Navy officials and have been sent to KPU.”
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