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Campaign teams for the two losing candidates in last week’s presidential election got together in Jakarta on Tuesday to swap notes on what they might do, separately or jointly, to improve their vote counts by pursuing alleged campaign and election-day violations of the Presidential Election Law.

Members of the campaign teams of second-place former President Megawati Sukarnoputri and third-place incumbent Vice-President Jusuf Kalla met on neutral territory without the candidates present.

“We want to go over manipulations and violations during the elections that should be revealed to the public,” said Gayus Lumbuun, coordinator for Megawati’s campaign team.

He said that his team approached the meeting with the idea of a possible joint approach to collecting evidence that could become the basis of court challenges.

“With similar evidence, we would have similar interests in similar legal cases,” Gayus said.

However, no decisions have yet been made on a possible joint effort.

Gayus said his team believed that Megawati and her vice-presidential running mate, Prabowo Subianto, could gain more votes through legal challenges because “we think that we’re solid and our popularity is increasing, compared to the 2004 election.”

The Megawati-Prabowo team has been a fierce critic of the widely condemned voters list produced by the General Elections Commission (KPU).

Megawati’s daughter, Puan Maharani — a possible future leader of her mother’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) — has even blamed the list for the party’s poor showing in the legislative elections in April.

Prabowo alleged last week that his campaign team had u ncovered more than 10 millio n fictitious names on the final voters list released by the KPU.

The fictitious names were allegedly spread across lists in more than 200 districts.

The team said there were six million fictitious names on lists around Java Island alone. It also claimed to have found 150 people with the same identities and addresses at a polling station in Lampung Province.

Hasto Kristiyanto, a Megawati campaign official, said the Megawati and Kalla teams had pledged to seek more evidence of election violations to be presented to the Constitutional Court.

Hasto said that the two teams had a common bond.

For example, both sides are eager to improve the quality of democracy in Indonesia, he said.

Hasto said that Megawati’s campaign team would still bring its allegations of electoral fraud before a court of law in Indonesia.

“We will formulate several moves, whether they are political or legal moves,” he said.