Voter turnout lower than 1999 polls: KPU

Fabiola Desy Unidjaja, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The General Elections Commission (KPU) admitted on Saturday that voter turnout was low for the April 5 legislative election, but mainly attributed it to an administrative quandary rather than to public apathy toward the event.

KPU deputy chairman Ramlan Surbakti said many registered voters were unable to exercise their constitutional right because they did not receive their voter's card.

Besides which, many voters mis-punched their ballot papers, resulting in invalid votes, he said.

"Please do not jump quickly to the conclusion that the low turnout was due to a public indifference to the election," Ramlan told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

The number of registered voters across the country who did not vote is still unknown, but many observers said public participation in this year's legislative election was relatively lower compared to the 1999 general election.

In the capital of Jakarta, for example, 1.8 million -- or almost 20 percent -- of 6.2 million registered voters did not vote in the April 5 election.

Voter turnout in the 1999 election, the first since the downfall of former autocrat Soeharto, reached 94 percent of about 119 million registered voters.

Senior researcher Rustam Ibrahim from the Institute of Economic and Social Studies and Development (LP3ES) concurred with Ramlan that administrative problems had contributed to the low participation.

"Th enthusiasm is still there, but the new election system and the new registration method hindered people from participating in the election," Rustam said.

In the April 5 election, voters had to punch either the party logo or both the logo and the picture of their chosen legislative candidate. Due to poor dissemination of information on the election, however, many voters marked only their preferred candidate, rendering their votes invalid.

In the previous election, voters needed only to mark the party logo.

In addition, many eligible voters were unable to vote because they had missed the registration period. According to Rustam, 9 percent of eligible voters across the country failed to register and were thus unable to vote.

The number of unregistered voters in Jakarta alone, according to Rustam, amounted to 19 percent of total eligible voters.

"We calculated that around 7 percent of votes cast were declared invalid, but we will not know the actual voter turnout until the counting is finished," he said.

The participation of overseas Indonesians was even worse: only 23 percent of eligible voters had registered and only 20 to 30 percent of around 410,000 registered voters cast their ballots.

Meanwhile, the Golkar Party widened its lead over the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) in the provisional vote-count, garnering 21.05 percent of 90,356,837 votes counted. The PDI-P collected 19.57 percent, and was followed by the Indonesian Awakening Party (PKB) with 11.98 percent, the United Development Party (PPP) 8.with 32 percent, and the Democrat Party with 7.52 percent.