Cast your minds back to February 2024, in the campaign lull before Indonesians hit the ballot box, a documentary unceremoniously dropped on youtube.

Now, documentaries on electoral campaigning are legion, and generally they attract a pretty narrow audience.

By contrast, Dirty Vote, directed by acclaimed Indonesian investigative journalist, Dhandy Dwi Laksono, garnered 6.4 million eyeballs in the first 48 hours, over the week Dirty vote attracted half a million tweet on twitter, trending worldwide. Overall Dirty Vote had over 30 million viewers. So to say Dirty Vote went viral would be putting it mildly.

And yet Dirty Vote was anything but ephemeral.

In a large warehouse, against what was a essentially a giant power-point deck, three nationally renowned Constitutional lawyers, Bivitri Susanti, Feri Amsari and Zainal Arifin Mochtar systematically laid out the case for a critical double take on how key figures, principally then- President Jokowi, were using all the instruments of the state to ensure the 2024 national election would be won by his anointed successor, Prabowo Subianto. This included Bansos, or social welfare payments, the use of police to pressure and criminalise village heads and opposition figures, and of course, the Supreme Court decision’s overturning the election law to allow Jokowi’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka to run as VP.

Now that team is back, with their sequel Dirty Vote two, and they are here once again to methodically unpack the consolidation of the Prabowo regime.

My guest today is Dirty Vote presenter, Dr Zainal Arifin Mochtar, Professor at the faculty of Law at the Gadjah Mada University. Pak Zainal has been involved in the establishment and running of number of research centres, including Pukat Korupsi UGM, the Centre for Anti-Corruption Studies, Caksana Institute and the Administrative Law Society. He also serves on the board of the Partnership for Governance Reform and has won numerous awards over his career, including the Muhammad Yamin Constitution Award in 2016 and the Best Constitutional Law writer from the Constitutional Court in 2018.

You can find Dirty Vote 2 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=895Cqij7i00