Just hours before election day, the General Elections Commission (KPU) was promising Tuesday to follow up on reports that tens of millions of unidentified people, children, deceased individuals and servicemen were still registered on the controversial electoral roll.
"This is an amazing discovery, and I promise you that the KPU will follow up on this report and take all necessary actions toward it," KPU Chairman Abdul Hafiz Anshary told reporters at the KPU office at 16:00 West Indonesian Time (WIB).
His statement came after the KPU received a report Tuesday afternoon from the JK-Wiranto and Mega-Prabowo campaign teams, which made these concerning allegations. The teams had worked from Monday evening until 3 p.m. Tuesday to find the discrepancies.
The report was based on the KPU's fixed electoral roll, which when run through a computerized verification system managed to identify voters registered under the same name, citizenship identity numbers (NIK), birth dates and addresses as one another.
The campaign teams found more than 5.8 million voters registered under the same name, 2.7 million registered under the same name and NIK, 1.3 million under the same name, NIK and birth date and a further 1.1 million registered under all the criteria.
The figures were from 70 of the 115 regencies and municipalities, suggesting mistakes in the roll could surge much higher once taken from nationwide data.
Fadli Zon, from the Mega-Prabowo campaign team, said his team could not complete the process of searching for errors because they were interrupted by another event.
"I think we would have found tens of millions of illegal voters out there if we had kept on searching," he said.
Hafiz said it was possible there were two identical voters registered with the same details on the roll, because Indonesia's citizenship database was not scheduled to be finished until 2011.
He said the report would be sent to polling bodies at all levels and any ad hoc election committees in subdistricts and villages.
He said that sometimes during the registration process, the KPU encountered hundreds of people who had forgotten their birth dates but were certainly eligible voters.
Rully Chairul Azwar, a member of the JK-Wiranto campaign team, urged all poll workers in the regions to be very accurate when identifying voters.
Ruhut Sitompul, a member of the Yudhoyono-Boediono campaign team, thanked the KPUD for tightening up the verification process and urged the public to keep the peace Wednesday.
"Whatever will be, will be. The show must go on. Let's make this presidential election a success," he said in English.
Problems with the electoral roll came to light for the first time during the gubernatorial elections in East Java in January, re-emerged in the April 9 legislative elections and climaxed Monday when Megawati and Kalla approached the KPU to verify whether or not the list had been updated.
