(Jakpost) The election year: Public steps up participation in voting process

12/12/2018

The year 2014 was a milestone in Indonesia’s young democracy, the country successfully holding one of the largest elections in the world.

The 2014 general election consisted of a legislative election on April 9 and a presidential election on July 9.

The legislative election involved four million officers stationed in 550,000 polling stations throughout the country’s vast archipelago, having to deal with 700 million ballot papers and 190 million eligible voters.

In terms of voters, an Indonesian general election is the second largest single-day election in the world after the United States.

But what made this year’s election stand out from past elections was the surge in public participation. Not only did voters cast their ballot, they also guided the ballot count until the final process.

“I see the strengthening of political discourse among voters and their quality amid the necessity to continue improving the electoral system and institutions,” Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) executive director Titi Anggraini told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

She said that the remarkable public participation was spurred by technological advancement, especially social media.

“The public initiated movements to choose better candidates, seriously probing their track records and so on. Therefore, public participation has begun to shift from formal, which means simply coming to polling stations to vote, to a more substantial form, which is political discourse,” said Titi.

Other forms of public participation included public monitoring during the campaign period, voting and vote tally processes using technology, such as smartphone apps and social media, on top of the traditional method of reporting electoral fraud to the official election supervisory body, the Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu).

Titi said that the public decided to step up to the plate after seeing the weaknesses in the election system, particularly the lack of supervision and law enforcement to prevent fraud.

“The enthusiasm of the public to report fraud was not matched by the way Bawaslu handled the reports. For example, until now Bawaslu has not released official data on the amount of reports they received or the status of those reports,” said she.

The use of technology was not exclusive to the public as it was also increasingly used by election organizers, particularly the General Elections Commission (KPU).

“The use of technology really increased, particularly at the level of election organizers. But if we’re talking about Bawaslu, then they’re not really utilizing technology. This is a challenge for the future,” Titi said.

She cited the example of the scanning of recapitulation documents, known as C1 forms, that were uploaded to the KPU website.

The scanning was meant to increase transparency, with anyone able to access the scanned documents for any purpose.

Citizens were eager to take the opportunities provided by this innovation, counting the votes tallied on each document and pointing out any irregularities on social media like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, especially during the presidential election.

“This innovation is simple but triggers participation,” said Titi.

She added that the participation of ordinary citizens in the vote-counting process was crucial since the tabulation process, conducted in stages from subdistrict level to national level, was vulnerable to manipulation.

“The vote tally process was the most frequent victim of fraud, not the voting itself,” Titi said. “The process was plagued by vote-trading and it was also marred by the glacial speed of the recapitulation process at the national level by the KPU.”

One day before it was supposed to finish the tally of votes in the legislative election on May 9, the KPUhad yet to count the votes in seven provinces out of 33. The KPU finally managed to finish the recapitulation right before midnight, sparing it from any sanctions.

“Many people said that this year’s general election was the most brutal in terms of vote-buying. But we can’t truly compare it to 2009 because there are instruments now that didn’t exist in 2009, such as social media, which makes it easier for people to detect fraud and discuss it,” said Titi.

However, the competition among legislative candidates and presidential hopefuls also resulted in intensifying electoral fraud.

“The political competition got more intense between political parties and even among members of the same party because of the open proportional system [in the legislative election],” Titi said.

The open-list proportional system gave candidates more time to prepare their strategies, whereas in 2009 the government used a closed-list proportional system that gave political parties the authority to decide which candidates would sit in the legislature.

The system also resulted in losing candidates flocking to the Constitutional Court to contest the result of the elections.

This year, the number of legislative election disputes filed at the court rose to 902 from 601 in 2009.

“The number increased because this year the court also handled internal conflicts,” Titi said.

In the 2009 election, most plaintiffs were contesting results against opposing parties. Most of the disputes centered on alleged violations concerning ballot counts and vote-buying.

The 2014 general election marked the last time Indonesia had separate legislative and presidential elections, with the country poised to hold both elections on the same day in 2019.

The government and election organizers are also considering moving toward an electronic voting system (e-voting) in 2019.

Both the Home Affairs Ministry and the Agency for Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) have said that electronic-based elections (e-elections) were feasible and that they could begin as soon as next year for the concurrent regional elections.

KPU chairman Husni Kamil Manik, however, said that the election organizer was not ready to implement the system next year.

But he did not brush off the use of technology for the 2015 regional elections, revealing that the KPU was planning to implement an electronic recapitulation system (e-recap) next year.

“The most simple one right now is e-recap, which uses recapitulation forms, commonly known as C1 forms, and we have already have the experience of publishing those forms from 98 percent of polling stations in the country [during the 2014 presidential election],” he said. - See more at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/12/29/the-election-year-public-steps-participation-voting-process.html#sthash.m646zldy.dpuf

JejakParlemen

Berita Terkait

Kategori Berita

(Jakpost) The election year: Public steps up participation in voting process