KPU has slim change of beating deadline for announcing results
KPU has slim change of beating deadline for announcing results
Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The General Elections Commission (KPU) has only a slim chance of
meeting its April 30 deadline to announce the official results of
the legislative election, as only 91 of the 440 local-level KPUDs
have delivered their results.
The documents from the 91 KPUDs were undergoing verification
before the final result in each regency is given to political
parties for their approval, KPU member Rusadi Kantaprawira said.
The manual counting, not the electronic tallying, is the basis
of official results. KPU officials said the body would up its
efforts to announce final seat numbers won by political parties
in legislative bodies by April 30.
The KPUDs' deadline to deliver data to the KPU is April 21,
and it faces more questions about its credibility on the heels of
an embarrassing hacker attack on its website on Saturday.
Police are investigating the incident in which political
parties' names were changed into humorous ones at 6:40 p.m. on
Sunday, until the website returned to normal at 10:40 p.m.
The KPU's failure to train lower level election officials has
become more evident with the approaching deadline.
While a KPU circular had required KPUD officials to type in
tallying results in the Excel software program, "Some KPUDs
submitted only hand-written ballot counting results and others
typed the ballot counting into computer programs, but not into
Excel," Rusadi said.
The KPU had earlier said the general results of the April 5
legislative election, including invalid votes and voter turnout,
would be available nine hours after the elections, based on
technical calculations.
Two weeks after the election, voter turnout and invalid votes
remain unknown.
"So far, all we can see is that some 460,000 of about 580,000
polling stations have transferred the (results of) ballot
counting to the KPU, so we can only know the total number of
valid ballots from the 460,000 polling stations," KPU IT team
head Akhiar Oemry told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the display of computerized ballot counting at the
Borobudur Hotel will be closed on Monday evening, the day the
contract for the display ends.
Oemry said data on invalid votes "might be available at the
data center, but not on the website."
"But we will continue the computer-based ballot counting and
announce the final result on the KPU website" despite the end of
the display, he said.
The electronic tallying in KPU's website has raised an uproar
among some political parties, most who have polled worse than
expected. Critics have pointed out to some Rp 200 billion spent
for establishing the computer-based ballot counting, including Rp
152 billion for the procurement of computer hardware and
software.
Without mentioning figures, KPU deputy chairman Ramlan
Surbakti indicated voter participation this year was lower than
that in the 1999 election, largely because registered voters did
not receive voter cards or spoiled their ballot papers. A
significant percentage of potential voters remained unregistered.
As of 10:20 p.m. Sunday, the KPU computer ballot counting had
counted 91,008,865 votes or just 61.7 percent of the total
registered voters.