Invalid votes reach 8.5%
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The General Elections Commission (KPU) closed its vote tabulation center on Monday due to a shortage of finances, with an average 8.5 percent of invalid votes recorded.
Chairman of KPU IT team Akhiar Oemry said the highest number of invalid votes was found in the election of the Regional Representatives Council (DPD) members, which saw 12 million or 12.5 percent of 96.8 million votes counted declared ineligible.
The lowest number of invalid votes was recorded in the election of regental/municipal legislature members with 6.29 million or 6.7 percent of 93.29 percent counted.
Invalid votes in the election of House of Representatives members stood at 6.69 million votes, or 6.8 percent of 97.96 million votes counted.
"Invalid votes include ballot papers which were perforated outside the proper section, pierced twice or where only the names of legislative aspirants were pierced," Oemry told reporters.
For the election of the provincial legislature members, invalid votes reached 7.92 million or 8 percent of 97.58 votes counted as of Monday.
A number of surveys conducted before the legislative election on April 5 revealed that many people were not informed about how to vote, which showed that KPU efforts to disseminate information regarding the elections were lacking.
The KPU has admitted its failure in the area of voter education.
Despite the closure of the vote tabulation center, the KPU IT team will continue the computerized vote counting, which can be viewed at its website tnp.kpu.go.id.
Oemry said so far 447,140 of 585,337 polling stations had sent their manual ballot counting results to the KPU IT team.
The KPU, he added, could not estimate the voter turnout as the ballot counting was still in process. KPU deputy chairman Ramlan Surbakti said he anticipated the voter turnout this year would be lower than the 1999 election.
Oemry said the highest data transmission came from Yogyakarta with 9,060 polling stations, or 98 percent of 9,245 polling stations in the city.
By contrast, Maluku had only transmitted data from 24 polling stations or 0.39 percent of the total 6,038 polling stations, making the province with the least counted ballots reported to the KPU in Jakarta.
Ramlan said the commission could not meet its target of tabulating all election results from the regional KPUDs by April 21.
He said the local KPU in Mentawai, East Seram and West Southeast Maluku, had told the KPU that they could not meet the deadline due to transportation problems.
"There is not sufficient gasoline for the available airplanes in the regencies to fly the ballots counted," Ramlan said, adding that the KPU would ask for help from the Indonesian Military (TNI).
Ramlan, speaking after a meeting in the Constitutional Court, said that the KPU was consulting the court over possible disputes over election results.
"We told them that we will only issue the results of votes garnered by the political parties and members of the regional representatives councils (DPD). We will not announce the confirmed number of seats they (the political parties) have garnered," he said.
The KPU, Ramlan said, would still try to complete the ballot counting by April 25 at the latest.
Based on KPU instruction No. 636/2004, which revised KPU instruction No. 100/2003 on the timetable for the legislative election, the KPU plans to announce the results of the legislative election on April 28 at the latest.