Jakarta – The integrity of November's regional elections is being undermined once again, this time by a massive identity theft scandal, which the General Elections Commission (KPU) and the Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) have been quick to dismiss.
The police have also turned a blind eye despite reports by around 300 people that their identity had been used without their knowledge to support an independent candidate in the Jakarta gubernatorial election.
Both the KPU and Bawaslu had already been faulted for a series of ethical breaches in the way they ran the presidential elections in February. No one went to jail but KPU chair Hasyim Asy'ari lost his job last month, although that was for sexual harassment.
The ID theft, which implicates the KPU, should have led to criminal prosecutions. Instead, no one is being held accountable for the misuse of the ID cards of potentially hundreds of thousands of Jakarta voters. The final figure will never be known as police have closed the case.
The ID theft claims surfaced last week after KPU Jakarta announced that Dharma Pongrekun, an unknown retired police general, had qualified to run in the election as an independent candidate since he claimed to have gathered the endorsement of more than 800,000 residents, far more than the 677,468 threshold.
The staggering number of endorsements quickly raised suspicions. Soon, many people who checked the KPU Jakarta website found their names, and ID numbers, on the list without their consent. Then the blame game started, which ended up with no one being held accountable for what is clearly a criminal act.
Dharma said he was not involved in gathering the endorsements. His team said it did not verify every single person of the 800,000 names most of which were submitted "in batches of thousands" to their social media platform.
KPU Jakarta said it verified a sampling of the names, all of which checked out. When news broke of the ID theft claims, the KPU invited Jakarta residents to check its website, and if they found their names on the list, they could "withdraw" their support. Bawaslu said only 275 people had done so by Wednesday's deadline. Dharma is good to go.
Behind all this maneuvering is the effort, almost at all costs verging on the criminal, to ensure the Jakarta election is a two-horse race. A strong candidate is former West Java governor Ridwan Kamil, who has the support of all but one of the parties that have representatives in the Jakarta legislative council. The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which is not part of this coalition, does not meet the threshold to put up its own candidate.
In the event of a single-candidate election, the KPU has to provide an empty box on the ballot papers to give voters an alternative to the lone candidate. In a rare few cases in past regional elections, the "empty box" has beaten the candidate. Dharma is clearly being fielded to lose the election and to avoid the empty-box phenomenon that could potentially embarrass Ridwan.
The KPU, Bawaslu and police may have washed their hands of the scandal, but by failing to act they are dangerously normalizing ID theft in this country by state agencies. Needless to say, they will undermine their own credibility and public trust.
Source: https://www.thejakartapost.com/opinion/2024/08/23/poll-integrity-undermined-again.htm