Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – With less than a year left before Indonesia conducts unprecedented direct elections, the slow, messy preparations are already sparking concerns of possible irregularities when the polls are held.

The General Election on April 5 next year would be the first of its kind in the country. Parliament endorsed a Bill in February that adopts a new electoral system to elect legislators. This new system calls for a redefinition of electoral areas, which were traditionally divided into cities, regencies and provinces.

The independent body which runs the elections, the KPU or General Election Committee, will define these new electoral areas based on a voter registration process being conducted by the State Statistics Agency (BPS) this month.

After the electoral areas are determined, the political parties can submit their candidates for parliament and regional legislatures for KPU approval.

But the registration process has posed the biggest challenge to KPU. BPS, which has deployed some 230,000 bureaucrats and community leaders to carry out the massive census, has admitted that progress is slow. It says it might need to extend the period by at least two weeks.

The process has been hindered by a lack of registration forms, public awareness and public acceptance. The officers doing the census work are also ill-trained.

Given only seven months to prepare the campaign, KPU has little time to raise public awareness of the process. Many households have thus been surprised by the visiting officers.

Registering voters has been hampered because people take time to produce required documents such as family registration cards, identity cards and birth or marriage certificates.

Further complicating the process is that residents in some areas are being told by their religious leaders to boycott the process as an expression of dissatisfaction with the current political leaders. In areas where anti-government sentiment runs high, such as Aceh and Irian Jaya, some residents have been too suspicious to cooperate.

In addition, the slow disbursement of funds and a lack of qualified people are making it hard for KPU to meet a May deadline for setting up some 400 offices across provinces, regencies and cities to implement and oversee the election process.

The KPU decided to hold the legislative elections two months earlier than originally planned in June to avoid a situation in which a new president is not in place after the incumbent president vacates the post in October of the election year.

This is because the first ever direct presidential election would probably be held separately after the legislative polls. It will be held in two stages if none of the candidates get more than 51 per cent of the vote.

This means the massive logistics of running and tabulating three sets of elections with approximately 130 million voters must be done in a matter of months.

Mr Hadar Gumay of the Centre for Electoral Reform, a non-governmental organisation campaigning for a fair electoral system, told The Straits Times: "The schedule is too tight, it does not allow room for mistakes. With the low level of competency of the electoral officials, and with KPU being ill-equipped and under-funded, this election could be marred by rigged results." For example, he said, in other countries, it takes up to three years to define electoral areas.

By contrast, the KPU is only allotted five months to determine some 1,500 new electoral areas across the country based on the results of the registration process. Failure to come up with the most proportional electoral districts can provide unfair advantages for certain political parties, he said.