Anita Rachman – Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi and Justice and Human Rights Minister Patrialis Akbar on Monday said the country's election organizers should be free from any political influence, and called for political party members to be banned from polling bodies.
The ministers met with the House Commission II, overseeing home affairs, to discuss the revision of the Election Organizers Law, which is targeted to be finished in the current sitting period, which ends in July.
Seven of the nine political factions in the House of Representatives have pushed for an amendment on the Law on Election Organizers to allow cadres to sit on the election boards. Only the ruling Democratic Party and the National Mandate Party (PAN) were against the proposal. Watchdogs have warned several times that with the integrity of the nation's legislature already at rock bottom, allowing active politicians to sit at the National Electoral Commission (KPU) would only make matters worse.
The current law states that applicants to election organizing bodies must have not been active members, such as office holders, of political parties for five years but they are allowed to join immediately upon resignation.
The Democrats and PAN are fine with retaining the status quo. But the seven other factions want the law amended to eliminate the five-year wait prior to applying to work as an election organizer, such as with the KPU or the Election Supervisory Board (Bawaslu), but want to impose a similar five-year wait to re-join a party after quitting such as position.
Gamawan said that the government believed a resignation from a party did not necessarily mean that links between them would cease.
"That proposal also doesn't go along the spirit of the Constitution that requires and independent election," he said. "Thus, the government proposes the House to consider the article."
Nurul Arifin, a legislator from the Golkar Party, said the seven factions will insist that politicians' rights to join KPU must be considered, as long as they have resigned from their party.
Other points that are being debated by the government are about the organizers' Ethics Council and KPU's tenure, which lawmakers want to shorten so organizers could work earlier and leave the job sooner.