Five days to the 2019 Indonesia presidential election on April 17 and things have gotten interesting.

Some 40,000 to 50,000 votes have been allegedly discovered in Malaysia marked in favour of Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and his running mate Ma’ruf Amin, The Jakarta Post reported.

Votes were supposedly discovered in a raid, according to a video

The allegation stemmed from videos circulating social media on April 11, purportedly showing the discovery of the votes in 20 bags during a raid on an empty store in Kajang, Selangor

However, Malaysiakini said there were about 50 bags instead.

Here is a post of the incident:

Apart from Jokowi and Ma'ruf, the videos supposedly also showed ballots marked for another candidate from Indonesia's NasDem Party, Achmad, for Indonesia's legislative election.

NasDem is one of the country's political parties that has thrown its support behind Jokowi as Indonesia's presidential candidate.

Both NasDem and the Jokowi-Ma'ruf campaign team have since denied the accusations of vote-rigging.

Who conducted the raid and why was the raid conducted?

Even as the video has been submitted to Indonesia's General Elections Commission (KPU) for assessment, conflicting accounts have emerged over who conducted the raid and why it was conducted.

Yaza Azzahara Ulyana, head of the Indonesian Kuala Lumpur Elections Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu), said they had conducted the raid on the basis of a complaint lodged by a campaign team member of Jokowi's challenger, Prabowo Subianto, The South China Morning Post reported.

Separately, a politician from Jokowi's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), Masinton Pasaribu, suggested that while the alleged vote-rigging might be true, Jokowi's camp was not involved, The Jakarta Post highlighted.

In elaborating on his claim, Masinton added that the ballots had not been discovered by the Indonesian election authorities in Malaysia, but rather by people from Prabowo's camp.

Vote-rigging in Malaysia is run by a syndicate

Masinton further added that vote-rigging in Malaysia was run by a syndicate and was a rampant problem in every election, The Jakarta Post further reported.

Masinton went as far as reveal the alleged price of a vote: "They pay 15 Malaysian ringgit [S$4.93] for each ballot."

Voting day in Malaysia urged to be rescheduled

Prabowo's camp has since denied the allegations of being involved in the raid, adding that it called on the KPU to reschedule election day in Malaysia, in light of the incident, as per The Jakarta Post.

Malaysia-based Indonesian voters are set to cast their votes on April 14.

Prabowo's campaign team official, Sufmi Dasco Ahmad, was quoted as stating:

"We sent a letter to the KPU to postpone the voting process until the commission gives us an explanation on how many ballots are deemed problematic."

He further added that the team would also send their own officials to Malaysia to check on the situation.

In total, Malaysia is estimated to be hosting over 980,000 Indonesian voters, more than any other country, The South China Morning Post reported.

Vote-rigging and election fraud accusations perennial features in Indonesian elections

Such a case is nothing new in Indonesia, however, with accusations of vote-rigging and election fraud having been a perennial feature of Indonesian elections since Suharto's time.

In 1997, prior to his ousting, a landslide victory by Suharto's party, Golkar, in an election, had resulted in the opposition United Development Party accusing the government of vote-rigging to win, according to the New York Times.

And in 2014, in his previous challenge against Jokowi for presidency, Prabowo had withdrawn from the election process, alleging massive election fraud, BBC reported.

Top image from Ina Moore Facebook