Ballot counting contines, despite glitches
Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
When the data appeared on Wednesday morning, not just the public were shocked but also the General Elections Commission (KPU). At around 9 a.m, a local TV network suddenly showed some 70 million votes counted for several minutes, but then returned to 4.9 million.
According to Achiar Oemry of the KPU IT department, the problem was caused by the TV network's own mistake, there was never such a number at the KPU.
More surprising figures appeared on the screens shortly before President Megawati Soekarnoputri arrived in the afternoon at the IT ballot counting center at the Borobodur Hotel in Central Jakarta.
As of midday on Wednesday, the total number of counted votes still stood at 4.99 million, but two hours later, just before President Megawati arrived, the number of votes counted suddenly jumped to 18.29 million.
Early in the morning, Golkar still led the tally with 1.25 million votes, followed by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with 841,705 votes.
But just before Megawati's arrival, her PDI-P party's votes had reached 3.74 million, with Golkar in second place with 3.64 million votes.
Oemry added that the ballot count using the information technology (IT) infrastructure had not run perfectly due to slow data entry and verification at the district level.
He insisted that most of the district election committees preferred to collect all the polling station data from their districts before sending it on to the KPU data center in Jakarta.
"That's why the count has been very slow over the first two days -- April 5 and April 6. But since Tuesday at midnight, the district committees have been sending all their data to us so that the count has been progressing quite quickly today," he told reporters.
On Tuesday night, the total number of counted ballots displayed by the KPU's IT system had reached 2.9 million votes.
As of 11 p.m. on Wednesday the total number of votes counted had reached over 27 million.
Oemry estimated that the flow of data from district committees across the country would reach its peak over the next few days.
According to Oemry, verification, which is carried out directly by the KPU server, would detect whether data had been sent more the once. After the data had been verified, the KPU data center would feed it to the IT system in the Borobudur Hotel, the KPU's website -- kpu.go.id -- and television stations.
"I hope the electronic counting will be completed as quickly as possible now that the district committees are all sending their data to us," he said without specifying a timetable.
The KPU repeatedly said that the count was expected to end nine hours after the first data transmission from the district committees, with each district committee being expected to send the results from 10 polling stations every hour.
These were not the only difficulties that affected the electronic ballot count over the last two days.
On Tuesday evening, the figures displayed by kpu.go.id and television stations suddenly switched to zero from around 2 million.
Oemry said that the KPU had deliberately stopped feeding the data to the public and television stations as the data, which is provided free, was being sold by television stations to other users.
"This is unfair to the public and to us as all the data should be free -- not for sale," he said.