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.