KPU admits electronic vote counting may fail

Moch. N. Kurniawan and Dadan Wijaksana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Six days away from the April 5 voting day, the General Elections Commission (KPU) admitted on Tuesday disruptions could occur during the nation-wide electronic ballot counting process, partly due to insufficient testing.

Although official results will not be released until all parties approve them on April 25, the KPU's Information and Technology department -- which connects 4842 districts across the archipelago -- coordinates the votes counting and is supposed to provide important preliminary election results.

On April 5, it is predicted about 147 million of the nation's eligible voters will select representatives for seats in the national House of Representatives and for provincial and regental/municipal levels of government. Voters for the first time will also choose four representatives for their province to sit on the Regional Representative Council. If every elligible voter makes at least three votes, the total number of ballots cast will top 400 million.

IT official Basuki Suhardiman said the KPU started a vote- counting simulation only a week ago that covered less than 10 percent of the districts. The tests raised doubts over whether the system was adequately equipped to deal with such a mammoth task.

"From our first dry run last week, which covered around 400 districts, we've learned that there were still technical problems disrupting the process," Basuki said.

"The disruptions were mostly in the networking, such as connection errors and failures in data entry," Basuki said.

Testing over a wider area was underway to overcome these challenges, he said.

He also did not rule out the possibility the system would be sabotaged by hackers. "We've anticipated that, but threats remain. I'd say the chance of the system being attacked by hackers is 1 percent."

Around Rp 200 billion (some US$25 million) has been allocated to put the commission's IT system in place, with Rp 152 billion allotted for computer supplies.

Under the current system, the ballot papers will be manually counted in each polling station, before being handed out to local district election committees (PPK), which will deliver the results electronically to the data-collecting center set up at the Hotel Borobudur here in Jakarta.

In the event the required infrastructure is not yet available at district level, the data will then be transferred up to committees at the regency or municipal level, before being sent to the central data center.

KPU officials have admitted many regency and district offices of the election committees were not adequately prepared to handle the system.

If everything went well, Basuki said it would take about nine hours from the start of the ballot-counting in the polling stations for the KPU to collect and accumulate the total votes cast.