Febriamy Hutapea – The five million people added to the new national voters list for the July 8 presidential election will remain a mystery until the General Elections Commission (KPU) reveals its methodology for revising the list, an election watcher said on Thursday.
"The KPU may not have had a satisfactory mechanism for updating the data because it has not allowed us to access the detailed information over its voters list," Muhammad Turmudzi, monitoring coordinator of the People's Voter Education Network (JPPR), said on Thursday.
The commission announced last week that it was updating the voters list, which resulted in a total of 176.4 million names being included, an increase of five million from the previous list.
KPU member Syamsul Bachri said on Thursday that the voters list could only be accessed at the district level. He said that the universal data could not be accessed because "it's still under an ongoing process."
Turmudzi said that, so far, access to the newly revised list had not been universally provided.
Turmudzi said that 32 percent of 195 JPPR volunteers, who each had been sent to one of 195 sub-districts across the country, had reported that people still could not access the list. "This can create a conflict on the day of the presidential election, if people still cannot cast their votes," Turmudzi said.
He said that the final voters list data announced by the KPU should be open to the public in both soft- and hard-copy form so that people could learn the reasons for the large increase in the number of voters.
Adnan Anwar, a researcher from the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Education and Information (LP3ES), said on Thursday he had warned that the voters list could be used as a tool to maintain someone in power if the KPU did not seriously resolve the problems with the list.
He suggested the government give the authority to manage the voters list to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) instead of the Home Affairs Ministry.
Meanwhile, a special committee of the House of Representatives that was formed to investigate the list will be led by Gayus Lumbuun of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).
The deputies are Lena Maryana from the United Development Party (PPP), Rustam Tamburaka from the Golkar Party and Ignatius Mulyono of the Democratic Party.
House Speaker Agung Laksono said that he hoped the committee could start the investigation immediately. "We want to be better prepared, so that the presidential election can be much better than the April legislative elections," he said.