Camelia Pasandaran – The General Elections Commission continues to face new challenges in the distribution of ballot papers across the country and has been unable to increase the rate of production.
On Wednesday, the Maluku Elections Commission complained to the central commission, or KPU, that it still had not received its ballot papers. "So far, we've only received ballot papers for one out of seven election areas in Maluku," said Jusuf Idrus Tatuhey, head of the Maluku commission.
Boradi, deputy of the KPU logistics bureau, said all ballot papers for Maluku had been printed "but the logistics have been difficult." For example, "ballot papers for Ambon [the capital of Maluku] were sent to Halmahera" by mistake.
In addition, three regions of Maluku – southwest Maluku, and the regions east of Seram and Aru Islands – had been difficult to reach via land transportation.
"The ballot papers have not been distributed to any of these areas," Boradi said. "Rain and the high-tide season makes it difficult to distribute the papers. It will take some time. The KPU should have taken this into consideration."
Boradi said that for the previous Maluku gubernatorial election, ballot papers had been distributed a month in advance.
In another problem area, ballot papers for Papua Province had been mistakenly sent to West Papua Province. "Around 100,000 ballot papers were wrongly distributed from Papua to West Papua," Abdul Aziz, the KPU member overseeing logistics procurement, said on Wednesday.
Also, thousands of ballot papers meant for West Java Province had been sent by mistake to Central Kalimantan.
Aziz said such mistakes were the responsibility of the printing companies contracted to produce the ballot papers. "They have to be able to send them to the right districts," he said.
Aziz said the printing companies still had enough time to fix the delivery problems. He said that of the 686,244,953 ballot papers required for the national election, the printers had now produced 62 percent.
"By Wednesday morning, 431,988,698 ballot papers had been printed," he said.
However, only around 50 percent of the printed papers had been dispatched to district election commissions. "We have sent 204,530,992 papers to the provinces," Aziz said.
The ballot paper production has been completed for 16 provinces. These include Aceh; Central, South and East Kalimantan; North, Central, South East and West Sulawesi; Gorontalo; North Maluku; East Nusa Tenggara; Bangka Belitung; Riau Islands; Papua and West Papua.