Golkar relishes ample margin at top of polls

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Having taken a slim lead in the vote count from the April 5 legislative election over the past five days, the Golkar Party now enjoys a comfortable margin as the top vote getter.

As of 11 p.m. on Friday night, Golkar had 21.02 percent of the 89,572,300 votes counted, while President Megawati Soekarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) was lagging behind with 19.62 percent.

Golkar's lead, however, comes as no surprise because long before the April 5 legislative election, scores of opinion polls showed the party of former president Soeharto's New Order regime winning the elections, especially outside of Java and in the eastern region of the country.

If the vote count continues in this direction, the PDI-P could end with less than 20 percent of the vote, a dramatic slump from its 34 percent gain in the 1999 elections.

Election study groups have estimated that 87 percent of over 147 million registered voters cast their ballots on April 5.

The Jakarta General Elections Commission (KPUD) said earlier that in the capital, 4,542,726 people voted, or about 75 percent of the approximately six million registered voters.

There was no change in the positions of the other political parties in the ballot count.

The party of former president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, the National Awakening Party (PKB), stands in third with 12.04 percent of the vote, ahead of the United Development Party (PPP) in fourth position with 8.28 percent.

Two upstarts, the Democratic Party and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) remained in the fifth and sixth positions, respectively. However, the Democratic Party has begun to inch away from the sixth-placed party with 7.52 percent of the vote, compared to 7.14 percent for the PKS.

The political vehicle of People's Consultative Assembly Speaker Amien Rais, the National Mandate Party (PAN), stands in seventh place with 6.47 percent of the vote.

Commenting on the vote tally, which has moved at a snail's pace over the past three days, the chief expert of the General Elections Commission (KPU)'s IT division, Akhiar Oemry, said there were no technical problems at the commission's data center.

"We have received no information about disruptions in our system. The problems are resulting from sluggish data entry by election commissions at the subdistrict level (PPK)," he told The Jakarta Post in a telephone interview.

He said officials at some PPKs preferred to enter the data only after all of the ballots from the polling stations had been collected.

"This backlog is the chief reason why we have seen no progress in the tally in the last few days," he said.

Oemry said there was nothing the KPU could do about the backlog because there were no rules regarding the pace of data entry.

"We have issued circulars on how to speed up the data entry. However, it was of little use because the PPK officials did not heed the order."

Oemry dismissed the possibility that the backlog was an attempt by PPK officials to manipulate the ballot count.