KPU admits electronic vote counting may fail<\/p>\n
Moch. N. Kurniawan and Dadan Wijaksana, The Jakarta Post,
\nJakarta<\/p>\n
Six days away from the April 5 voting day, the General Elections
\nCommission (KPU) admitted on Tuesday disruptions could occur
\nduring the nation-wide electronic ballot counting process, partly
\ndue to insufficient testing.<\/p>\n
Although official results will not be released until all
\nparties approve them on April 25, the KPU's Information and
\nTechnology department -- which connects 4842 districts across the
\narchipelago -- coordinates the votes counting and is supposed to
\nprovide important preliminary election results.<\/p>\n
On April 5, it is predicted about 147 million of the nation's
\neligible voters will select representatives for seats in the
\nnational House of Representatives and for provincial and
\nregental\/municipal levels of government. Voters for the first
\ntime will also choose four representatives for their province to
\nsit on the Regional Representative Council. If every elligible
\nvoter makes at least three votes, the total number of ballots
\ncast will top 400 million.<\/p>\n
IT official Basuki Suhardiman said the KPU started a vote-
\ncounting simulation only a week ago that covered less than 10
\npercent of the districts. The tests raised doubts over whether
\nthe system was adequately equipped to deal with such a mammoth
\ntask.<\/p>\n
\"From our first dry run last week, which covered around 400
\ndistricts, we've learned that there were still technical problems
\ndisrupting the process,\" Basuki said.<\/p>\n
\"The disruptions were mostly in the networking, such as
\nconnection errors and failures in data entry,\" Basuki said.<\/p>\n
Testing over a wider area was underway to overcome these
\nchallenges, he said.<\/p>\n
He also did not rule out the possibility the system would be
\nsabotaged by hackers. \"We've anticipated that, but threats
\nremain. I'd say the chance of the system being attacked by
\nhackers is 1 percent.\"<\/p>\n
Around Rp 200 billion (some US$25 million) has been allocated
\nto put the commission's IT system in place, with Rp 152 billion
\nallotted for computer supplies.<\/p>\n
Under the current system, the ballot papers will be manually
\ncounted in each polling station, before being handed out to local
\ndistrict election committees (PPK), which will deliver the
\nresults electronically to the data-collecting center set up at
\nthe Hotel Borobudur here in Jakarta.<\/p>\n
In the event the required infrastructure is not yet available
\nat district level, the data will then be transferred up to
\ncommittees at the regency or municipal level, before being sent
\nto the central data center.<\/p>\n
KPU officials have admitted many regency and district offices
\nof the election committees were not adequately prepared to handle
\nthe system.<\/p>\n
If everything went well, Basuki said it would take about nine
\nhours from the start of the ballot-counting in the polling
\nstations for the KPU to collect and accumulate the total votes
\ncast.<\/p>",
"url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/kpu-admits-electronic-vote-counting-may-fail-1447893297",
"image": ""
},
"sponsor": "Okusi Associates",
"sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com"
}