Andra Wisnu, Jakarta – The presidential election may have been widely regarded as being largely free and fair, but the electoral count was still prone to fraud due to the recent Constitutional Court (MK) ruling, a coalition of poll observers warned Friday.
The Indonesian Voters Committee (TEPI), a member of the NGO coalition, said the recent MK decision that allowed voters to use ID cards to vote on election day had the potential to allow corrupt polling officers to add or reduce votes, as the verdict rendered the electoral roll nearly useless.
"The MK ruling allowed unregistered people to vote, making the election more accessible," said Jerry Sumampouw, the coordinator of TEPI, at the General Election Commission's (KPU) office in Jakarta, on Friday.
"However, it also makes the electoral roll obsolete because corrupt officers could tick extra ballots with the excuse that the extra vote was done by a person who registered using ID cards."
The Constitutional Court ruled a day before polling day on July 8 that the public who wanted to vote but were not on the electoral roll may use their ID cards or passports to register on site, provided that they brought additional proof of identification such as a family card.
The ruling was made after several issues were raised regarding the electoral roll on the previous legislative election, which according to observers preventing 49 million people from voting.
Jerry said such practices were possible during the vote counting at the district level and the regional level, citing the number of procedural violations that his organization found during vote counting at the polling station level.
"According to the observations of our 800 volunteers, which we had in 800 polling stations in 26 municipalities or cities in 19 provinces, 33 percent of the polling officers did not give copies of the electoral roll to the election witnesses because they said they didn't have the money to copy the lists.
"So how can we tell how many people actually voted if we can't see the electoral roll? How would we know if the list had been added to or reduced at the district or regional level?"
In a related development, the KPU stopped updating its national tabulation site due to technical difficulties in receiving text messages of vote count results from polling station officers. The tabulation site, which was supposed to show how 20 percent of Indonesians voted, was stopped Thursday with 18,908,132 votes tallied, or about 9 percent of the total registered voters.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono still leads the counting with over 61 percent, followed by Megawati Soekarnoputri with 29 percent and Kalla with 10 percent.