People claiming to be former Teman Ahok volunteers say Ahok supporter KTP collection fraught with fraud

For all the hard work volunteer group Teman Ahok has put into collecting 1 million Jakartan KTP ID cards to support Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama’s independent run for re-election in 2017, they have also made plenty of enemies along the way, chief among those being people connected to political parties who don’t want the status quo of party politics in Indonesia to be disrupted.

However, a group of people claiming to be former Teman Ahok volunteers made the shocking claim today that Teman Ahok’s KTP collection process has been fraught with fraud. During a press conference in Cikini, Central Jakarta today, they claimed that one of the lies that Teman Ahok has been hiding from the public is it’s use of volunteers to collect KTPs.

“We were paid. The payment system was we had a target of collecting 140 KTPs per week and if we did so, central would pay us Rp 500,000 per week,” said Paulus Romindo, who claims that he was a former KTP collector for Teman Ahok in Kelapa Dua, West Jakarta, as quoted by Kompas.

Paulus added that he worked under a contract.

Furthermore, the supposed ex-Teman Ahok employees said they committed many fraudulent acts to further Ahok’s cause, such as submitting one KTP multiple times and paying people to submit their KTPs.

Teman Ahok responded to these allegations this afternoon via a press release on their official website. In it, Teman Ahok said that the accusations were likely orchestrated by an unnamed mass organization and politicians who took advantage of these former Teman Ahok KTP collectors to damage the group’s reputation.

Teman Ahok explained that these KTP collectors were indeed employed as independent contractors or agents by the group specifically as Teman Ahok’s arm to collect KTPs from hard-to-reach settlements of lower income citizens. They were incentivized with money and/or facilities whenever necessary in order to encourage them to collect as many KTPs as possible. The money that was used to incentivize these KTP collectors were raised from Teman Ahok’s merchandise sales and personal donations from people within the group.

However, Teman Ahok found that some groups of the KTP collectors, like the people who came forward with accusations against the group this morning, committed various types of fraud while collecting KTPs. As such, Teman Ahok said they have identified the problematic collectors, cut off working ties with them, and stressed that the KTPs they gathered were not included in Teman Ahok’s final KTP count.



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