In a powerful display of just how popular Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama is and how much people want him to run as an independent candidate in the 2017 governor’s election, political group Teman Ahok just last night announced that it has collected over 532,000 voter IDs, the minimal amount legally required for an independent candidate to run in Jakarta. And, incredibly, Teman Ahok managed to collect all of those IDs in just one month.
“We were so busy collecting ID cards, we just realized the number of ID cards we’ve collected is enough to meet the MINIMUM REQUIREMENT TO REGISTER AS AN INDEPENDENT CANDIDATE.”
“We reached a total of 532,000 within just 1 Month since we started recollecting IDs for Ahok-Heru. #Celebration500thousand”
Teman Ahok has actually been collecting IDs in support of Ahok’s independent run since last June. But, when the governor officially announced last month that he would be running for reelection as an independent candidate with Jakarta’s Finance and Regional Asset Management Agency head Heru Budi Hartono as his running mate, Teman Ahok basically had to start over from scratch and begin collecting voter IDs from people supporting Ahok and Heru together.
Rather than being deterred by this setback, Teman Ahok pursued their goal even more aggressively with volunteers manning booths at malls and other locations across Jakarta. A group even created a GoAhok app so that people could have their voter IDs picked up by courier.
A Teman Ahok spokesperson, Amalia Ayuningtyas, told Tempo that, despite having reached the required minimal amount of IDs needed, the group is still planning to fuflill its original plan of collecting one million IDs for Ahok. “If you can get maximum support, why stop at the minimum?”
Of course what we really want to know is what Gerindra party politician Habiburokhman is going to do now. As you might remember, he famously tweeted that he would jump off of the National Monument (Monas) if Ahok collected the minimal number of IDs
A group called PartaiSocmed called him out on Twitter for it last night:
“How are you tonight? Is your heart rate normal?”
He replied, “Thank God (it’s fine), if your ‘master’ finally gets arrested, why don’t you all work for me instead.. direct message ok.”
So then they asked him point blank:
“So when are you going to jump as promised?”
“Hehehe, your tweet is not creative even for you, are they paying you less?”
No, you’re not missing anything, it’s just a pretty lame evasion on Habiburokhman part. We’re sure he’ll have plenty of other excuses too when more people question why he hasn’t already made the leap off of Monas. We’re not sure why he’s so afraid – Ahok already said he’ll make sure there’s an ambulance waiting for him at the bottom.
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