The General Election Commission (KPU) is optimistic that it can beat the two-week deadline given by the Election Supervisory Body (Bawaslu) to fix the glitches in voter list data for the 2014 polls.
On Wednesday, the KPU postponed publication of the final voter’s list following protests from Bawaslu and political parties who said that the list was flawed and could leave millions of eligible voters disenfranchised.
Bawaslu had earlier said that more than 11 million voters could lose their right to vote if the glitches were not fixed.
Bawaslu and political parties that will contest the 2014 poll demanded that the KPU fix the problems before finalizing the list.
“We are sure that we can meet the deadline. We actually believed that our data was accurate but since other parties [political parties and Bawaslu] doubt it, we will fix problems [like duplication of data] through the program we have on our database,” KPU chairman Husni Kamil Manik said on Thursday.
Husni said that data correction could take some time because the KPU could only make changes to the data by changing its variables manually with data collected by local election commissions (KPUD).
Valid voter data should have five variables; name, date of birth, civic registration number, gender and address. If one of the variables is missing, the data is considered inaccurate.
KPU commissioner Ferry Kurnia Rizkiyansyah said that the KPU would accommodate complaints from political parties and Bawaslu.
“We will match our data with that of political parties and Bawaslu. Their data should have more details so we can spot the problems. We will crosscheck the data directly at our offices in regencies and municipalities,” Ferry said.
Ferry said that the postponement would not affect the election schedule as the next stage in the election process, which is logistics provisioning, would only start on Nov. 14. He said the printing of ballot papers kicked off in December.
Bawaslu said that there was a mismatch in the data of around 400,000 voters. The KPU’s manual data showed that 186.8 million voters were eligible for the 2014 general election while the electronic data stored at the KPU website www.kpu.go.id showed 186.3 million voters. Bawaslu also recently announced that its investigation found that data on around 11 million voters was flawed.
Ferry shrugged off Bawaslu’s complaint. He said that the mismatch was a minor problem as the data was yet to be entered into the system. “All manual data will be entered into the system at the end, so it is not a problem,” he said.
KPU had announced that it had recorded the data of around 186,842,553 voters, comprising 93,544,429 male voters and 93,298,124 female voters, in all 496 regencies and municipalities.
Political parties have accused the KPU of underestimating the data problem.
The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) claimed its investigation found that data on 20.3 million voters was inaccurate.
“We don’t want to turn the invalid data into a future political issue, so it has to be fixed now,” lawmaker Arif Wibowo of the PDI-P said.
The NasDem Party put the blame for the “chaos” regarding the electoral roll squarely on the Home Ministry, which launched the electronic identification system in 2011.
The party called on Home Minister Gamawan Fauzi to resign from his position.
Gamawan shot back at his critics on Thursday saying that the KPU should share the blame for the data glitches.
He said that his office had already sent the KPU its data on potential voters in February, two months before the deadline set by the General Elections Law.
“That’s because they [the critics] know nothing [about the mechanism and our role]. We have nothing to do with the postponement, our role is only to assist the KPU,” he said on Thursday. (hrl)
Source/Fuente:http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/10/25/kpu-races-against-time-fix...
