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News Analysis: A democratic yet confusing and litigious-prone election
The most important political office, the late US Supreme Court jurist Louis Brandeis remarked, is that of the private citizen
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The most important political office, the late US Supreme Court jurist Louis Brandeis remarked, is that of the private citizen.
When Indonesia’s Constitutional Court last month revoked two articles in the (legislative) Election Law No. 10/2008 rescinding the party-dominated list system, their intent was to curb the power of party institutions and strengthen the “office” of private citizens.
The court ruled that legislative candidates with the highest number of votes in a particular district would automatically win the seat on offer, rather than use the party-determined list system currently in place.
While the court ruling is a sanguine step forward, it complicates an already brittle tallying process and potentially weakens the quality of democracy by soliciting the practice of “popular” elections.
Unless the court further rescinds articles in the election law — namely 202 and 203 — there is still no assurance that the candidate with the highest number of votes in an election district will receive a legislative seat, given the 2.5 percent national threshold for eligibility to be accorded a place at the House of Representatives.
Once the votes have been tallied across the country, only parties receiving at least 2.5 percent of valid votes cast are eligible for seats.
Only after this has been determined will individual candidates — whose party passes the national threshold — be accorded seats based on their individual performances in their respective districts.
In short, even if Candidate A tops the polls in the West Java I district, they may still not win a seat because their party did not pass the national threshold.
However if the Golkar Party, for instance, passes the national threshold and in the West Java I district (which has seven seats) wins 65 percent of votes, it can claim at least four seats in that district.
The top four Golkar candidates who performed best in that district win seats — even if their individual votes were less than those of nominees from other parties.
Litigation-prone is perhaps the prospect ahead unless significant “corrections” are made in the proceeding regulation or the Constitutional Court intervenes.
Another issue also arises in that by effectively altering the mechanism to a semi-open-list proportional representative system, the Constitutional Court has also failed to look at the long-term downside of intra-party conflict.
It also opens up the “hazards” of popularity over populism in determining voter choice and dramatically undermines a party’s ability to ideologically orient either its candidates or voters.
For parties like the National Mandate Party (PAN), Golkar and the Democratic Party, the amendment of the election system will have little bearing because they have previously agreed internally to allow candidates with the most votes to get seats.
It was a pragmatic decision, thereby transferring much of the onus of a high-cost election to the respective candidates.
As candidates fend for themselves, parties lose little, because the superseding proportional representation system and national threshold ensure effective party control.
Not surprisingly, parties such as the PAN have tried to leverage their popularity by soliciting the most number of celebrities in their ranks — people with high recognition and mass appeal, yet low on internal political clout.
The director of the Center for Electoral Reform (Cetro), Hadar N. Gumay, insists they are. According to collated data, some 51 percent of voters chose a candidate in the 2004 election compared to those who only selected the party.
To avoid further complications, what is now needed, Hadar told The Jakarta Post, is to simplify the confusing voting process that currently invalidates votes for use of other than a simple tick to define their choice or ticks for both the party and candidate on the voting sheet.
