House in a dilemma over allocation of seats
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
While it is almost certain that the 2004 election will adopt a proportional representation (PR) system, just exactly how the 550 seats in the House of Representatives are to be distributed between the provinces is a potentially contentious issue that could pit the heavily populated Java against the rest of the country.
The bill on general elections, already sent to the House for deliberation starting next month, proposes a combination of PR and district electoral systems, but without stipulating what constitutes a district and how the seats should be distributed to each province or district.
The International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), in a paper published this week, proposes the multi-member district proportional representation (MMD-PR) system, one that could accomplish best the goal of one-person/one-vote/one-value.
IFES, in a study funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), urged the House to settle the matter in the early stages of the bill's deliberation.
"Allocation of seats to provinces is a preliminary electoral issue that requires serious and immediate attention by the House in reviewing the new draft election law," the study said.
Rather than one seat/one district, it proposes more than one seat to be contested in each district: The seats are then given to party contestants in proportion to their share of the vote.
The study proposes redrawing the electoral boundaries, pooling sparsely populated regencies outside Java into single districts and dividing densely populated Java provinces into several electoral districts.
Under the proposal, the country's 30 provinces would be carved up into between 76 to 91 electoral districts, depending on how many districts the provinces in Java are divided into.
Under this proposal, using the 2000 population census, each seat would represent between 275,299 people (not registered voters) in North Maluku, and 381,886 people in East Kalimantan.
This system would still be more representative than that used in 1999, when the 462 House seats were divided among 27 provinces on the basis of population and number of regencies.
In 1999, heavily populated provinces in Java were not as well represented in the national legislature, even if they had the largest number of seats.
Based on the number of registered voters, a seat in Papua (with 13 House seats) was worth 77,066 voters, in East Timor (then still an Indonesian province with 4 seats) 105,024 and Aceh (with 12 seats) 123,858.
In contrast, a seat in Yogyakarta was worth 321,567 voters, East Java 320,759, Central Java 312,010, West Java 308,945 and Jakarta 281,792 votes. This is in spite of their receiving respectively 5, 68, 60, 82 and 18 seats in the House.
The system proposed by IFES seeks to redress this imbalance.
The study noted the establishment of the Regional Representative Council (DPD), the upper house in the People's Consultative Assembly, in which each of all 30 provinces, whatever their geographical or population sizes, would be represented by four members. The council would represent "territory" while the House would represent "people".
The proposed districts would only be used for the purpose of the election of the national legislature, and not for administrative purposes or the election of local legislatures.
The proposed MMD-PR would reduce the size of "wasted votes" of the 1999 general election, as well as eliminate the number of parties winning the seats. Smaller parties will have less chance of picking up one or two seats in Java than they did in 1999.
IFES also proposes the use of an "open-list" voting system, in which people would vote from a list of candidates that have been proposed by their parties. In 1999, people voted for political parties which allocated the seats to registered candidates after the seats were divided.
The bill on general elections was rather vague on how the seats should be distributed, but stated that this would be the job of the General Elections Commission.