T

he Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) said that the government should seriously consider implementing an electronic voting (e-voting) system for overseas voters to make it easier for them to cast their votes.

Perludem executive director Titi Anggraini said on Thursday that the government had begun discussing an e-voting system in 2009 but it never came to fruition. She said that to begin with, the government could introduce the system to overseas voters.

'€œThe government could actually try and start applying the system for overseas voters as they are much more prepared in terms of knowledge, technology and connectivity,'€ she said.

Mohamad Al Arief, the president of the Indonesian Diaspora Network (IDN) who now resides in the US, said that the time-consuming registration and election process might hamper the election committee abroad to reach potential voters.

He mentioned that there were 250,000 to 300,000 Indonesians in the US spread out in 50 states while there were only five representative offices. Arief said that the embassy and consulate generals had provided online registration facilities, but voters still needed to go to polling stations if they wanted to cast ballots.

Muhammad Kamaluddin, committee chairman of the 2014 elections at Qatar, said that one of the difficulties facing the committee was to attract potential voters from the informal sectors, such as housemaids. '€œThere is a regulation in Qatar that we have to reach those Indonesian housemaids through their employers. We cannot guarantee that housemaids would be allowed to come by their bosses,'€ he said.

Perludem chairman Didik Supriyanto said that e-voting was really important for overseas voters especially given the fact that they might find it difficult to reach the polling stations.

'€œThe thing is that there is no strong commitment from the government to really make it work,'€ he said.

Meanwhile, KPU chairman Husni Kamil Malik said that the KPU could not provide an e-voting system at the moment because the current regulation did not accommodate such a process. '€œOur regulation does not allow us yet to use e-voting as an official method to cast ballots. The law stipulates that we can only use paper,'€ he said on the text message to The Jakarta Post.

Law No. 8/2012 on general election stipulates that the equipment for election consists of ballot box, paper, ink, ballot room, stamp and polling station. The participation of overseas voters in the legislative election was quite low. In the legislative election in 2009, only 329,161 voters out of 1.4 million registered overseas voters who cast their votes. (koi)