One of Indonesia’s major political parties says problems related to poor preparations for next year’s elections are threatening the country’s democracy.
“It is clear that the 2014 legislative and presidential elections will repeat all the weaknesses of the 2009 election,” Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) secretary general Tjahjo Kumolo told the Jakarta Globe on Wednesday.
Tjahjo said the General Elections Commission (KPU) seemed to be in a rush to release the final list of registered voters, in the process risking leaving large numbers of people disenfranchised.
He said that after spending Rp 58 trillion ($5.1 billion) on a system to issue electronic identity cards, or e-KTP, to all Indonesians of voting age, the government and the KPU could still not guarantee that the public would get the clean and honest elections they deserved.
While there has been near-universal clamor for the voter lists to be based on the e-KTP data, now hosted in a central government database, both the government and the KPU have refused to do so.
Tjahjo also took issue with a Constitutional Court ruling in June with regard to the Bali gubernatorial election in May, saying that the court’s decision to dismiss claims by the PDI-P’s candidate of voters being allowed to vote multiple times or by proxy would set a dangerous precedent for next year’s elections .
“The upcoming legislative and presidential elections could be undermined because the ruling contradicts the of one person, one vote,” he said.
“Why bother having an election if one person can cast their vote 40 times?”
The court at the time defended the ruling on the grounds that there did not appear to be a systematic attempt at ballot stuffing, and pointed out that witnesses called to testify by the PDI-P had admitted to also voting multiple times for the party’s candidate, who went on to lose by a narrow margin to the incumbent.
The decision is now back in the public glare after the Constitutional Court justice who presided over the hearing, Akil Mochtar, was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of taking bribes from at least two candidates with similar poll disputes being heard at the court.
Ahead of the polls, however, the issue of the massive discrepancies between the KPU’s provisional voter lists and the actual numbers on the ground have prompted warnings from democracy watchdogs.
Husni Kamil, the KPU chairman, said on Monday that his team had only managed to match the identification numbers of 115 million people on the provisional list of eligible voters, out of the 190 million e-KTP numbers provided by the Home Affairs Ministry.
He said there were at least 75 million people whose ID numbers did not match those on the voter list.
Andreas Hugo Pareira, a senior PDI-P official, told the Globe that the mismatch suggested serious and systematic violations by the Home Affairs Ministry.
He alleged that the problematic data was indicative of the failure by the administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to properly manage the country.
Andreas urged the KPU to learn from mistakes made in the 2009 elections, when there were widespread problems with the voter lists, raising calls at the time of manipulation and disenfranchisement. That year, a significant number of suspected violations were reported.
Andreas said the PDI-P had repeatedly raised its concerns with the KPU, pleading for the voter lists to be fixed.
Meanwhile, political expert Mulyana W. Kusumah predicted that there would be no runaway leader in the 2014 legislative election, as there was in 2009 with the Democratic Party.
The Democrats won 20.8 percent of votes that year, enabling them to nominate a presidential ticket without the need to form a coalition. No parties are expected to do as well next year.
Author/Autor: Markus Junianto
Source/Fuente: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/poor-preparation-for-2014-election-may-endanger-democracy-pdi-p/
