KPU admits electronic vote counting may fail
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.