The General Elections Commission (KPU) said on Friday it might fail to meet its own deadline of May 9 for announcing the official results of the legislative poll.
KPU commissioner Hadar Nafis Gumay said a delay was possible as the commission would still have to conduct revotes in all polling stations in South Nias in North Sumatra.
He said the revotes and recapitulations might hamper the national recapitulation process, scheduled to be held from April 26 to May 6.
“It is very hard. I am worried that it might even disrupt the schedule [of the national recapitulation] because there are so many things that we have to prepare,” he told reporters at the KPU’s headquarters in Central Jakarta.
Hadar explained that the logistical preparations would be difficult considering the legislative election had been conducted two weeks ago on April 9 and now the KPU was on the brink of the national recapitulation process. “Our prediction is that the logistical needs will be huge and it has to go to go to tender, which is time consuming,” he said.
Hadar said the Elections Monitoring Agency (Bawaslu) had recommended that revotes be conducted in 1,085 polling stations, for 249,137 voters. This meant the KPU had to provide 1,016,480 ballot papers for the revotes purposes, according to KPU logistical bureau deputy head Susila Hery Prabowo.
Hadar said that the need to conduct revotes in so many polling stations came as a shock to the KPU. “We’re quite surprised the number was so huge. Was the problem so bad that the revotes needed to be done in all polling stations?” he said.
According to Hadar, Bawaslu should have been able to determine which polling stations needed to go through revotes and which did not. “If we read the recommendation from the South Nias Election Supervisory Committee [Panwaslu], there were only 82 [polling stations] where the revotes needed to be held. Why did it become all [polling stations]?” he said.
Bawaslu commissioner Nelson Simanjuntak said the revotes should be held in all polling stations because of the widespread scale of vote-manipulation practices.
According to him, almost all Polling Station Working Committees (KPPS) in the regency failed to submit vote-recapitulation forms (C1) to election supervisors.
Apart from that, the Bawaslu also found several irregularities, such as scribbled C1 forms and the fact that the number of valid and invalid ballots was higher than the number of voters who voted.
While Bawaslu had recommended that revotes be held in the entire regency, KPU commissioner Sigit Pamungkas said that he had discussed with the committee and both parties had agreed to clarify the number of polling stations where revotes were needed.
“The KPU and Bawaslu will clarify the number of polling stations which had no problems, the polling stations where revotes need to be conducted and the polling stations where we only have to recount [the votes],” he told The Jakarta Post.
Source/Fuente: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/04/26/kpu-may-delay-announcement...
