Polls may be reheld in several areas in the city

JAKARTA (JP): The Jakarta Provincial Elections Committee will decide on Thursday whether to repeat the polls in places where violations were found, committee chairman Djafar Badjeber said on Tuesday.

Djafar said a decision to repeat the polls would be taken if vote discrepancies could not be settled after completion of the ballot recount.

"The Election Law allows such a repetition. Moreover, the Jakarta Election Supervisory Committee has confirmed that they will support our steps as long as the violations are significant," he said after meeting with representatives of the supervisory committee at the provincial committee office in Central Jakarta.

He said the provincial committee was still waiting for reports from mayoralty committees where the ballots were being recounted.

The provincial committee instructed the district elections committees last week to recount the ballots, or check the tally against earlier documented counts, after scores of violations in the results were discovered.

The provincial committee revised a previous instruction which said that ballot recounting would be held in all districts, by saying that a recount would be held only in places where violations occurred.

Vote discrepancies were mainly detected in tabulation report documents from polling place committees, which differed from data released by subdistrict or district polling committees.

Many observers, including committee officials, believed the discrepancies were mainly the result of human error, as officials in charge of ballot counting were exhausted due to their day-and- night workload.

However, a representative of Jakarta chapters of 32 minor parties which demanded the recount, Ganda Hutabarat, said there were indications of political motives behind the violations.

"How can we say that the violations are merely due to human errors if the vote discrepancies reach thousands of votes," he said.

As of Tuesday, there was no significant progress in the recount process. Only the Central Jakarta committee had completed the task.

The recount was principally demanded by the 32 parties said to be disappointed by their poor showing in the polls.

Muhammad Taufik, a representative of the grouping, said executives of all 32 parties would hold a meeting late Tuesday to consolidate the relationship.

However, a source at the provincial committee said the meeting's agenda would also lead to discussion about further action, including the possibility of refusing to sign the official poll results released by the provincial committee.

Separately, chairman of South Jakarta mayoralty committee Sambudi Bakri said recounting would only start on Wednesday.

"We found vote discrepancies at nearly 60 percent of 2,347 voting places in South Jakarta," he said.(ind)