Panwaslu warns about possible vote recount
Kurniawan Hari, Jakarta
The Election Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu) warned on Friday of long delays in finalizing vote counting if the Supreme Court declared invalid a General Elections Commission (KPU) circular on double-punched ballot papers.
Panwaslu member Didik Supriyanto said a ruling against the circular would force KPU to recount the votes.
"If the Supreme Court annuls the circular, there must be a recount. The next question is whether it has enough time to do the job," he told a discussion here.
The KPU is scheduled to announce the final result of the July 5 election on Monday, with the top-two polling candidates facing each other in the Sept. 20 runoff.
The commission hastily issued a circular on July 5 declaring valid double-punched ballots, which were considered invalid under a previous circular.
However, many poll stations across the country, especially those in the eastern parts of Indonesia, continued considering the double-punched ballots invalid.
Gen. (ret) Wiranto and Amien Rais' campaign teams have complained the election process was flawed and say they are planning to ask the Supreme Court to review the legality of the circular.
Based on the provisional results, Wiranto and Amien ranked third and fourth respectively after Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Megawati Soekarnoputri.
Wiranto's team on Thursday named 15 flaws in the management of the election, including the issuance of the KPU circular, erroneous voter registrations, management's inability to stop widespread vote buying and a veiled campaign during the cooling- off period.
The team urged the KPU to revoke the circular and recount the votes.
Separately, Golkar Party leader Akbar Tandjung said on Friday he wanted to hear an explanation from Wiranto's campaign team before deciding whether to support the move.
Icu Zulkafril, a member of Amien's campaign, said the KPU circular had created problems. He said his team was considering taking legal measures against the circular and the vote counting, which he said was invalid.
Wiranto campaign team member Fahmi Idris, meanwhile, said the team had been collecting evidence for its appeal to the Constitutional Court.
Didik said while the KPU circular was erroneous, only the Supreme Court would have final authority to decide whether it was illegal or invalidated the vote counting.
The Supreme Court can issue a ruling only after presidential candidates request a judicial review.
Didik called for the KPU to explain the whereabouts of the remainder of the ballot papers. There were likely to be ballots left over because the KPU had ordered the printing of the papers before it knew exactly how many registered voters there were, he said.
Meanwhile, information technology analyst Roy Suryo criticized the low quality of the IT system the KPU had developed, saying the system was open to manipulation.
It would have been easy for the system's computer operators to change the result of the tally during the data-entry process, Roy said.
Roy suggested the KPU should publish a written result with data from all polling stations on the Internet. KPU officials could easily use scanners to make them publishable on the commission's website, he said.