Abdul Khalik, Jakarta – More than half of all the preliminary lists of eligible voters (DPS) released by villages and subdistricts throughout the country contain outdated data, a survey says.
The survey released Tuesday said the lists mostly mirrored the data on voters for the 2009 legislative election provided by the Home Ministry in April. The lists were intended to be updated by July.
The survey was jointly conducted by the Institute of Research, Education and Information of Social and Economic Affairs (LP3ES) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in 522 villages and subdistricts in all 33 provinces from Aug. 7 to Aug. 10.
Under the 2008 election regulations, the General Elections Commission (KPU) had three months to update the voter list after receiving it from the government.
All local election bodies should have announced updated preliminary lists at the village or subdistrict level on Aug. 8, leaving eligible voters with a week to verify their names on the roster.
However, election bodies failed to make public nearly a fifth of all such lists.
"The KPU's failure to announce preliminary voter lists in villages... has threatened the validity of the final voter lists for the 2009 election," LP3ES researcher Fajar Nursahid said.
"If there is no list, how can they (voters) check their names? Also, the lists that were on display contained incorrect and outdated data. If most villages and subdistricts still have the outdated lists, then what kind of voter lists we will have for the 2009 election?" he added.
Fajar said the lists showed many voters were not registered, while others were listed two and even three times.
According to the report, only 30.4 percent of villages and subdistricts released "complete" lists, and 50.3 percent made the "incomplete" versions public, while 19.3 percent failed to make any announcement at all.
The survey also found that 65.9 percent of KPU employees at the village and subdistrict levels admitted they did not update the voter lists from the government.
More than 33 percent of them said the lists were of "very low quality", making it difficult to use them as a basis for updating, it said.
Another major obstacle was the fact that many KPU offices at the village level were not yet established, while most election staff also complained about unclear instructions from regents and other local officials on what to do with the original data.
Even in Jakarta, many subdistricts have not yet released the voter lists while some others only announced them on Aug. 11.
"We have not released our DPS because we have not received the list from the Central Jakarta election office," said a staff member at the Harapan Mulya subdistrict office in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta.
Penggilingan subdistrict in Cakung and Kramat Jati in Kampung Tengah, both in East Jakarta, were among the city's urban areas that did not make lists public.
Officials there said their subdistricts had just received the original voter data on July 27 from the local administration.
The LP3ES and the NDI suggested that the KPU extend the period of DPS verification to give people more time to make the necessary changes.
"The KPU should not rush finalizing the voter list... considering that it still has eight months before the election," they said in a statement. The KPU is scheduled to close voter registration on Aug. 27 and release the final list of eligible voters in October this year.