Camelia Pasandaran – The General Elections Commission admitted during testimony in the Constitutional Court on Friday that it had knowingly furnished the presidential campaign teams with incomplete versions of the final voters list prior to the July 8 election.
Endang Sulastri, a member of the commission, also known as the KPU, told the court that the voters list handed to the campaign teams was different from the list used on election day.
The admission came on the final day of a hearing into allegations by the two losing presidential candidates, Vice President Jusuf Kalla and former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, that the final voters list contained millions of fictitious voters, making the results of the election flawed.
Both Kalla and Megawati say the flawed results mean a second round of election should be held. However, they both also claim that they should be the one to compete in the head-to-head poll with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Friday's admission by the KPU came after the commission attacked the Kalla and Megawati camps for having inaccurate information.
Arteria Dahlan, a lawyer from Megawati's camp, questioned the statement, saying he got the voters list from the KPU on July 6. "How can you say the information is wrong if it was officially given to us by the KPU?" he asked.
Endang admitted that the soft copy of the final voters list given to the campaign teams was not the fixed final voters list.
When Judge Abdul Mukthie Fadjar asked Endang why the commission distributed inaccurate information, she replied that the campaign teams had insisted on being supplied with the list. "So, you gave it to them to put them at ease?" Mukthie asked Endang.
Andi Nurpati, another member of the KPU, speaking outside the court, said they had been forced to give out the incomplete soft copy of the list as Megawati's campaign team kept insisting they do so.
"Actually, we're not obliged to give them the voters list, but we just wanted to show goodwill," she said, adding that the list had to be revised because it was inaccurate.
But Arteria said that if the final voters list was incomplete, it should not have been labeled as final. "How can it be final, when it still possessed inaccuracies?" he said.
Court Chief Mahfud MD said the court would deliver its verdict soon.
In the morning session of the same trial, Abdul Rasyid Saleh, director general of population administration at the Ministry of Home Affairs, denied allegations from Megawati's and Kalla's campaign teams that there was a high number of ghost voters on the list.
Ghost voters are said to come into existence when one citizen voter registration number (NIK) is assigned to several people with the same names, addresses or birth dates.
"There is no case of double or multiple NIKs assigned to several names," Rasyid told the court. "What really happens is that people have several identity cards based on their various residences, thus they get several different NIKs," he said. "We can't do anything as this problem has existed for 63 years [since Indonesia's independence]."
Megawati's and Kalla's teams on Friday submitted evidence that they believed proved there were 25 million to 28 million fictitious voters in the final voters list used for the July 8 election. The team also claimed that there were areas where voters had no NIK at all. The two camps argued that these meant Yudhoyono did not gain more than 50 percent of the vote, thus requiring a runoff round.