T

he Jakarta Election Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu Jakarta) is considering a proposal from an NGO to recruit more volunteers to monitor vote counting in the gubernatorial runoff election next month and report it online.

Ramdansyah, the Panwaslu Jakarta chairman, said on Tuesday the committee thought the proposal was a good idea, but had yet to make a decision.

“We agree that the public should be more involved in the election. With more citizen involvement, there will be more trust in the election result,” Ramdansyah said.

The poll supervisor, he said, would hold a meeting to discuss the proposal.

The Jakarta Electronic Democracy Forum (FeD Jakarta) has proposed a voluntary monitoring project in which citizens record vote counting results at their local poll stations.

“Our idea is quite simple. Volunteers can use smartphones or pocket digital cameras to take pictures of vote count recapitulation documents from their respective stations and then send them to us via the Internet,” Radhar Tri Baskoro, chairman of FeD Jakarta said.

Radhar said that the compiled data would serve as a comparative vote count recapitulation against the official one by the Jakarta General Elections Commission (KPU Jakarta).

“We hope to be able to ensure the validity of the counting and therefore prevent manipulation of the vote count result,” he said.

The compiled data, however, would not be issued until after the KPU Jakarta issued its own. “This is not a quick count project. We will respect the official work of the KPU Jakarta,” Radhar said.

FeD Jakarta was started online by the alumni of Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB). It claims to have more than 7,000 members.

Radhar said citizens involved in the project would not be paid. Volunteers would be asked to provide digital cameras and Internet connections themselves.

“The Panwaslu Jakarta need not set aside funds for this. All we need is approval from the committee and letters of acknowledgment for volunteers,” he said.

FeD Jakarta expected to be able to gather enough volunteers to record vote counting data from each of the 15,059 poll stations in five municipalities and one regency. The NGO said it had contacted a number of university student bodies to participate in the project.

In the July 11 election, the Panwaslu Jakarta deployed volunteers to 900 polling stations to monitor violations committed by polling station committees.

Most violations that the volunteers identified were related to the failure to provide assistance or facilities for disabled voters, issuing more than one ballot to a voter, the failure to display a voter roll and the like.