Another Talk about the Voter List

KOMPAS/ALIF ICHWAN

The General Elections Commission (KPU) holds a national-level recapitulation meeting on the fixed voter list at its office in Jakarta, on Wednesday (5/9/18). The meeting was attended by leaders of the KPU, the General Elections Supervisory Body (Bawaslu), the National Police, the Home Ministry and a number of related institutions.

To be honest, the behavior of the nation’s political elites is a little bit pathetic. The issue of the final voter list (DPT) has been brought up every time we head toward a general election.

Now, they are saying that, ahead of the simultaneous legislative and presidential elections on April 17, 2019, there are 25 million double-registered voters. It was House of Representatives Commission II deputy chair Herman Khaeron from the Democratic Party who first brought up the issue, as quoted by Kompas on Sept. 7. Apart from Herman, the Elections Supervisory Body (Bawaslu) has also said that it has found 131,363 double-registered voters in 76 regencies and cities.

The General Elections Commission (KPU) then said that it would accommodate the findings by political parties and Bawaslu. There are still 10 days to resolve the issues and improve the DPT. The DPT is a recurring problem that always crops up ahead of elections. The two most common problems about the DPT are unregistered voters and double-registered voters.

The media has often reminded everyone about the DPT’s crucial importance but it seems that we just have to accept the fact that the DPT will always be problematic. Problems regarding the DPT may actually exist, because of problems in the data collection. However, they may also be imaginary, triggered more by excessive skepticism about election organizers.

The two findings of double-registered voters, namely 25 million names by the Democratic Party and 131,363 names by Bawaslu, could not be more different. There is a huge gap of more than 24 million names between the two numbers. Surely this problem must be resolved to prevent any diminution of the election’s credibility.

The KPU has finalized the voter list for the general elections on April 17, 2019, to include 185.73 million names. However, there are still 10 days to improve the list based on input from Bawaslu and political parties. Voting is a citizen’s constitutional right that cannot be taken away because of mere administrative and technical issues. In the past several elections, the Constitutional Court under chief justice Mahfud MD issued a ruling regarding voting rights, namely that citizens can vote only by showing their electronic IDs.

We encourage the KPU, Bawaslu, the Home Ministry and representatives of political parties to sit down together and resolve this DPT issue. Political parties should be transparent regarding the 25 million names of so-called double-registered voters they have found in the DPT, by name and address. After the data is opened and verified, it must be cleaned up. The same thing applies to Bawaslu.

Sitting down together is necessary to resolve the DPT issue so that we can have a credible DPT. A non-credible DPT will only hurt democracy itself. If all parties refer to the same database based on the same list of citizen ID numbers as printed on their e-IDs, there should not be any difference in the voter list. However, once again, problems with the DPT always exist ahead of elections.

We encourage all relevant parties to sit down together and talk. Banish all negative thoughts of possible fraud as a DPT issue, in actuality, the problem belongs to all political parties.