Prabowo’s Victory Claim: Cognitive Dissonance or Deliberately Misleading?

By Erin Katrina

I confess that I am highly envious of my friends who are old enough to vote in this year’s election. But rules being what they are, (and keeping in mind that the eligible voting age in Indonesia is at seventeen years old) I have to be content with my role as an accompaniment to my parents as they went out early in the morning to cast their votes at our local KPS. Nearing voting age as well as reaching an age of seemingly high awareness on current affairs (well, that may be stretching it a little, but recent news from around the world as well as within my own country have made me realize the downside of apathy on politics) , this was an election that I paid close attention to. All the polls seem to predict a similar outcome that I viewed positively, but in these days of big data and the looming threat of foreign intervention on elections, I tend to believe that despite all our advancement in technology, human errors would always need to be accounted for.

As I wait anticipatingly at my mother’s office, in which they were holding the quick count, I watch as one side’s graph chart grew higher, and the other lower, as the margin grows wider. It seems as if the winner has already been determined despite only 40% of votes that have been accounted for. According to the logic of statistics, once over 50% votes have come in, the current polls would not differ widely from the final result. As the likeliness of presidential candidate Joko Widodo winning a second term grows closer, several people are already certain of his eventual victory. I was one of them as well. However, it appears that this could not be applied to everyone as Mr. Prabowo appears on the TV screen, a live stream from Berita Satu, proclaiming that he has won the election-according to his own internal quick count.

Now, the quick count isn’t the final arbiter on the results of the elections. But the final results of an election is almost never drastically different from the results of the quick count. Any sane rational person that has some experience of anticipating the results of the electoral process in Indonesia should be able to understand this. Heck, anyone who understands basic knowledge on statistics should be able to grasp this concept. However, it seems that Mr. Prabowo does not. Or does he?

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. This discomfort is triggered by a situation in which a person’s belief clashes with new evidence perceived by the person. When confronted with facts that contradict beliefs, ideals, and values, people will try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort. Now, this was the first thing that came to my mind when I first heard Mr. Prabowo proclaim his “victory”. It certainly does fit the description. Perhaps the shock of losing yet another election has just proved to be too much. But one must wonder about those around him and their passiveness at attempting to rein their candidate from making statements that make him sound like a delusional mental patient.

Initially, I thought the proper response to people making false claims such as these would be to ignore it. As the old adage says, better to ignore than to respond to it as it would draw more attention. But as I see people taking criticism to social media as well as sending flowers to the Electoral Commission as proof of their trust and belief in the quick count process, I’ve realized that in this era of fake news and its speedy journey throughout the world wide web, it would prove to be much more advantageous to retaliate head-on to counter whatever hoaxes are spreading.