So people expect this second round of direct election in 2010, or a year after the 2009 general elections, will be executed in a much more organized way. But, the fact shows the current management of local direct elections is much messier than in previous years.

One thing is certain. Nobody has learned from previous experiences and therefore the same problems will be repeated.

It has been discussed over and over that the most difficult challenge is how to ensure that people who have the right to vote will be guaranteed participation.

This can only be guaranteed if the majority of citizens are registered as valid voters on the electoral roll. The validity and the number of people registered in the final registration determine the validity and legitimacy of direct local elections.

A failure to ensure the validity of the electoral roll is likely to have an impact: Either the legitimacy of the winner will be doubted, or those who support the losing candidate will demand a revote.

Despite this, voter registration is still a serious problem. The root cause of the problem is the current practices of organizing the electoral roll lies in the hands of the Home Ministry whose job is to provide the election commission with population data. Meanwhile, the election commission is tasked to transform government data into a valid electoral roll.

So long as there are two responsible agencies in the data management, confusion will persist for years to come. The time has come to decide who should be responsible for the whole process.

Budget allocation is another problem. Allocation of the budget is determined by the request of Local Elections Commission. Nobody can deny the planning capacity of this agency is rather limited due to the inexperience of most of the commissioners and staff of its secretariat in organizing grand-scale events such as the local elections.

One can see this from the negotiation between the election commission and the local council as to the amount of budget that should be allocated for local elections.

However, the fundamental problem lies in the fact the capacity of the local government to allocate budget is extremely limited. It is publicly known that most of the local government budget is used to cover the expenditures of public services, especially the remuneration of civil servants.

The question is why the local government should be burdened with the expenditure of managing local elections, while most of them have limited capacity. The draft of the local election law needs to address this issue.

Out of the 244 regions that will have to organize local direct elections in 2010, 36 regions remain problematic. The 36 regions belong to the newly established regions. It is difficult to expect the preparation for local elections can be organized properly in these regions when even basic infrastructure facilities are still a serious problem.

The first five years of establishing the new regions have been spent on solving problems with their main region (daerah induk) concerning the assets that they have to divide.

In urban areas, this generally becomes a serious problem that the interference of the provincial government to mediate between the two is needed. In the later stage, the newly established regions needs to build basic infrastructure to really make their government function.

The government and the parliament need to review the functioning of local government especially for the newly established regions.

In the current 2004 Local Government Law, every new region that has been approved by the parliament will automatically bear the responsibility of managing 31 functions without taking into consideration their limited capacity. The new regions also need to conduct local direction once the acting heads of the regions complete their jobs.

Learning from the experiences of the New Order regime (under the 1974 Government Law) where there is step-by-step responsibility given to newly established regions, only after the central government regards that the newly established regions have the capacity to stand alone will the regions be given full autonomy.

Data has shown the leadership capacity of the region is a determining factor that will decide whether the region will succeed or not in managing its autonomy. Therefore, ensuring the management of local direct elections will be conducted without many problems is of utmost important.

Here lies the urgent need to clarify the position of the election commission and the Election Supervisory Agency that has been entangled in the selection process of election supervisors. The urgency is to review the 2007 Election Commission Law especially after clearly defining the boundary of responsibility between the two bodies.

The draft revision of the 2004 Local Government Law and the draft of the local election law has reached the final stage. The government and the parliament need to consider all the problems related to the management of the local government and the local election to prevent the same problems from occurring again and again.

The writer is the deputy senior team leader focused in the area of decentralization at the Home Ministry and a member of the drafting team for the revision of the 2004 Local Government Law and Local Direct Elections Law.

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