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The General Elections Commission on Wednesday said that it would not conduct a rerun of the presidential election, despite protests from the losing candidates about the legitimacy of the vote.

“The election law does not allow for the possibility of an election rerun,” said I Gusti Putu Artha, a member of the commission, which is known as the KPU.

Jusuf Kalla and Megawati Sukarnoputri, the two candidates who lost the election to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, had filed complaints with the Constitutional Court to demand a fresh vote.

Yudhoyono on Tuesday said that he welcomed this week’s challenges, adding that government institutions were designed to handle such challenges.

Putu said the law only outlined the conditions required to stage a second vote on a limited scale, but not at the national level.

“The Election Law allows for a vote rerun at the polling-station level, and only under strict conditions,” he said.

Bambang Eka Cahya Widodo, a member of the Elections Supervisory Board (Bawaslu), also said an election rerun was out of the question.

“An election rerun would mean repeating the entire election process,” he said.

“The only thing the court could rule on would be a vote rerun in certain locations, but that would also be under strict conditions. We would need proof that the election was not conducted fairly in specific places.”

If the losing candidates are concerned about inaccuracies in the voters list, they need to conclusively prove that certain individuals voted several times under multiple names registered on the final voters list, or provide evidence of people who were not registered, he said.

“It is not that easy to ask for a vote rerun,” he said.

Bambang said Bawaslu had received reports of voters who had allegedly voted several times.

“Our regional supervisory committees have reported that there were voters who voted more than once, but the number of those voters was not significant enough to change the election results,” he said.

Presidential spokesman Andi Malarangeng on Wednesday rejected the idea of another poll. “Fresh elections at this time of day?” he said in response to a question from an Antara reporter.

He said the information provided by the losing candidates was not valid and would not have an impact on the final election results.

However, he said that he was preparing responses to arguments put forth by Kalla and Megawati.

“We are ready with the data,” he said.

Megawati and Kalla “would have to prove” their claims, he said, adding that his data suggested that any inquiry into the election would probably result in more votes for Yudhoyono.