Parties back down on call for new poll

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

After firmly calling for a repeat election, the majority of the political parties backed down on their demand somewhat on Tuesday, now urging the General Elections Commission (KPU) to hold a manual retabulation from each polling station with the presence of their witnesses.

The parties' new demand was made late on Tuesday with some 84 million votes counted, from which the Golkar Party has 20.74 percent and the party of President Megawati Soekarnoputri, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), is running second with 19.92 percent.

The 19 upset political parties said that the key to rectifying the number of rampant irregularities in the ballot counting was by giving the public access to manual ballot counting from the polling station level onward.

Final results of the manual tallying process -- the official basis of the final election results -- will be announced by the KPU at the end of the month. The rules stipulate that witnesses are mandatory for the manual counting while they are not mandatory for the controversial electronic tallying.

In a meeting between the political parties and the KPU, Muhammad Razikun of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) said, "We have seen a wide discrepancy between data displayed at the KPU data center with the ones collected by our members who witnessed the ballot counting at each and every polling station."

In the manual recount that they requested, the political parties promised to deploy their witnesses to monitor the tally. The parties admitted that on election day last Monday and during the manual tallying that followed at each neighborhood polling station, they were unable to send their witnesses to the subdistrict tallying centers due to financial constraints, and that is where some of the accusations of fraud emanate from.

In the meeting presided over by KPU deputy Ramlan Surbakti, officials from all political parties took turns venting their resentment towards KPU members, whom they accused of tolerating rampant vote-rigging.

Leader of the Social Democratic Labor Party (PBSD) Mukhtar Pakpahan brought forth evidence from a number of remote areas in North Sumatra, in which Golkar party members had manipulated the balloting, he said, with the consent from members of the local poll committees. A repeat election should be done at least in regions where the violations occurred, he asserted.

Slamet Effendy Yusuf of Golkar also demanded that the commission hold a recount and added that they were responsible for rampant violations of election regulations. "The KPU should get serious about these violations, so that the political parties do not blame each other," he said.

The political parties also agreed that the KPU had to stop displaying the preliminary results of the electronic tabulation.

KPU member Mulyana W. Kusumah said the likelihood of a recount was very low. The decision to hold a recount could only be made by the district electoral committees, he noted.

Separately the Constitutional Court chairman Jimly Asshiddiqie called on political parties to settle the dispute over the election result by filing objections to the court.

"Do not confuse the public. The election law has provided a mechanism with which a dispute between a political party and the KPU could be settled with the interference of the Constitutional Court," he announced.

However, Jimly asserted that the court could not accept an objection filed by a group of political parties.

"The complaint that could be heard by the court concerns a dispute over the ballot counting that might affect the total number of legislative seats which should be allocated to a certain political party. Therefore, it concerns only the political party in question and the KPU," he said, quoting Law No. 12/2003 on general election.

Following the political parties' move to deny the validity of the legislative election, the PDI-P said on Monday that it was preparing for legal action, with 150 lawyers ready, as a response to rampant violations across the country that had affected the party.

PDI-P lawyer Trimedya Panjaitan, also a DPR member representing the party, said that the legal actions concerned a series of violations from the voter registration stage through the ballot tabulation.