Boy Scouts tabbed to run Al-Zaytun polling stations

Nana Rukmana, The Jakarta Post/Indramayu

The Indramayu General Elections Commission (KPU) has recently recruited 350 members of the local scouts movement to serve as poll workers in the election runoff.

As polling stations are to be located at Al-Zaytun boarding school, the initiative was taken as the school has allegedly prohibited its students and employees from working as members of local poll administrators or subdistrict polling committees, said an official of Indramayu's KPU.

Head of the Indramayu KPU Kurdi Sutrisna said the boy and girl scouts would help out at a number of polling stations around the large school complex. He said there would be 50 polling stations on the grounds of the Islamic boarding school, which is the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia.

"The polling stations are to be set up so that employees, students and members of the Al-Zaytun community in Mekarjaya village, Gantar, can vote," Kurdi said on Thursday.

According to Kurdi, 450 poll workers are needed in total. "At least nine poll workers are needed for each station. We will also be assisted by 100 locals," he said.

The Indramayu KPU will pay each poll worker Rp 40,000 (US$4.50) a day. "It's not much, but it is a token of our appreciation," he said.

Kurdi said the KPU could not ask the school to make its employees work at polling stations. "It's voluntary, and their lack of participation cannot be construed as obstructing the election," he said.

Kurdi said, in the April 5 legislative election and the first round of the presidential election on July 5, all of the poll workers in the area were from the boarding school. "No one from Al-Zaytun is prepared to be a poll worker now. This is a matter of concern," he said.

The boarding school has offered no official explanation.

Kurdi claimed KPU officials had tried to persuade the school's management to mobilize its students and employees as poll workers, but the school had refused on the grounds that it could be accused of vote rigging, an allegation that was made against it in the first round of the election.

Questions had arisen over the high number of people who attended the school to vote, while the school insisted that only those who were registered there -- 24,000 people -- had voted at Al-Zaytun.

The KPU, however, declared the poll results at the school invalid and scheduled a repeat election at the school on July 25, in which it determined there were only 11,565 registered voters.