Voter education successful: KPU
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta/Ambon/Banda Aceh
The General Elections Commission (KPU) claims that the dissemination of information on the legislative election was a success as reflected by the high number of valid votes.
KPU member Valina Singka Subekti admitted there were less valid votes in this year's election than in the 1999 polls, but said it could not be read as a setback considering the complex procedures in the recent election.
"Although the percentage of invalid votes has increased, I can say that our voter education was relatively successful due to the complexity of this year's legislative election and the limited time available to disseminate the information to the public," Valina told reporters.
As of Monday invalid votes for the election of House of Representatives members reached 6,691,583 or 6.8 percent of 97,964,840 votes counted from around 447,000 polling stations.
There were over 147 million people eligible to vote at more than 585,000 polling stations across the country in the April 5 election.
Out of 110,172,137 votes counted in the 1999 election of House members, 4,385,507 or 3.9 percent were declared invalid.
In this year's election, a voter should perforate a party symbol and the name of a legislative candidate belonging to the party or just the symbol of a party on the ballot paper.
In previous elections, people only voted for parties.
A number of surveys rated the KPU's performance in informing the public of the election procedures as poor, based on findings that many people were not aware of how to cast votes, the political parties contesting the election nor legislative candidates ahead of the poll.
Valina said the KPU would only announce the voter turnout for this year's election when the ballot counting was finished.
She also said that the KPU would open registration for additional voters for the presidential election between April 25 and May 10. The second chance to register followed complaints lodged by people who were unable to vote because they were not registered.
Separately, KPU member Anas Urbaningrum said the KPU would move back the registration period for presidential and vice presidential candidates from its original schedule between May 1 and May 7 if the commission failed to announce the election results on April 28.
The KPU is still waiting for results from regental/municipal election commissions, which should have been completed on April 20.
Meanwhile the commission has given the Maluku Provincial Election Commission (KPUD) an extension for manual vote counting to April 25. Maluku KPUD chairman Idrus Tatuhey said the KPU would not tolerate anymore delays.
The slow manual vote counting was due in part to discrepancies in the number of votes counted by the district election commission and witnesses who represented political parties.
"To speed up the process, we will take the results of the vote counting from the regental and municipal KPUD ourselves before we send them to Jakarta," Idrus said.
In Aceh, the Southeast Aceh regental election supervisory committee (Panwaslu) announced 59 violations, including the use of vote buying by Golkar Party.
Committee official M. Jafar said Golkar executives took back the money and construction materials it had given to local residents of a certain village to build a mosque after the party lost there.