Golkar assured of landslide victory

JAKARTA (JP): With Golkar's election landslide victory already well assured, attention shifted yesterday to the number of valid votes as the National Election Committee continued with its count.

By 5 p.m. yesterday, 109,891,230 votes had been counted, or about 88 percent of registered voters.

Golkar took the lion's share of votes with 74.27 percent, PPP accounted for 22.69 percent and PDI 3.04 percent.

The government, which had campaigned hard to encourage people to vote in Thursday's election, had traditionally never announced the turnout rate until much later.

The number of abstainers and spoiled ballots is often used as a rough measure of people's discontent at the political and election systems. In the 1992 election, 90.91 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

It is not immediately clear how many more votes were expected to come in, but the figures for many provinces remained unchanged throughout most of yesterday, as the committee published the latest tally of votes every two hours or so.

Some analysts had predicted a larger rate of abstention, especially among PDI supporters loyal to Megawati Soekarnoputri, the ousted leader of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI). Megawati, who was barred from leading PDI in the election, announced before election day that she was not going to vote.

Several provinces have already declared the vote counting over.

West Java counted 22,797,958 votes, or 89 percent of total registered voters in the province, Yogyakarta counted 1,740,196 votes, or 83 percent of total registered voters, and West Nusa Tenggara counted 1,838,238 votes, or 88 percent of registered voters, Antara reported.

Vote counting continued in Jakarta yesterday, which included ballots of Indonesians who voted overseas.

Counting in East Java could not be completed because authorities were organizing a new election in Sampang and Pamekasan, in Madura, where voters turned violent on Friday over allegations of vote rigging. Arrangements were being made to hold a new election on Tuesday at 111 polling stations.

Secretary-general of the General Election Institute, Suryatna Subrata, said yesterday the revote was called by district chiefs of election committees in the two regencies because of security disturbances, and not because of vote rigging allegations.

Barring any major surprises, this year's election victory looks set to become the best for Golkar in the six elections it has won since 1971. Its previous best record was 73.14 percent in 1987.

PDI officials refrained from commenting yesterday, but the tally of votes represents a big blow to chairman Soerjadi, who failed to repeat his 1992 feat when he led the party to its best ever performance by pulling in 14.9 percent of total votes.

In spite of the leap from 17 percent in 1992 to 23 percent, PPP officials in the region, taking their cue from leaders in Jakarta, complained about cheating and vote rigging.

In Bandung, PPP's West Java chapter said it had strong reasons to believe that some people voted twice at two different polling stations. "We base our suspicions from reports by official scrutinizers and PPP volunteers," chapter spokesman A. Zainaldi Zainal Asjikin told Antara.

The suspicion of vote rigging grew because some polling stations were slow in reporting final vote counts to authorities, he said, noting that some stations within Bandung filed reports later than those from outlying towns and villages.

"That is rather strange. Why the delay?" he asked.

"Although PPP votes in West Java rose from 16 percent to 26 percent this year, these violations are not acceptable," he said.

Similar PPP complaints had been voiced in a number of other provinces. Party leaders in Jakarta said on Friday they were contemplating court action and had contacted lawyers.

Although the National Election Committee has not announced the distribution of the 425 seats of the House of Representatives, it became apparent from provisional results yesterday that PDI's presence in the House will be decimated.

Based on the percentage of total provisional votes, PDI's seats in the House would be slashed from 56 to between 9 and 13. Golkar is estimated to have won at least 322 seats, and PPP 87.

Analysts calculated that between six and seven seats were not distributed because in some provinces the seats could not be divided into round figures.

These unclaimed seats would be the subject of negotiations between the three contesting parties in the next few days. (emb)

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