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Input 'glitch' may leave 65 million voters ineligible
Where is my name?: A man checks for his name on the voters list at Lenteng Agung sub-districtâs office in South Jakarta recently
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span class="inline inline-center">Where is my name?: A man checks for his name on the voters list at Lenteng Agung sub-district's office in South Jakarta recently. The General Elections Commission (KPU) found a number of irregularities on the list and that its voter ID card numbers did not match those registered with the Home Ministry. JP/P.J. Leo
The General Elections Commission (KPU) said it had uncovered inaccuracies in it's voter data that would affect more than 65 million people nationwide.
KPU chairman Husni Kamil Malik said the commission discovered the problem after comparing its voters list to data provided by the Home Ministry.
'We found that the identity numbers of 65 million eligible voters [in our online system] consisted of fewer or more than 16 digits [the official number of digits] ,' Husni said as quoted by republika.com.
Husni said the situation was the result of a data entry 'glitch' due to the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application, which limited entered numbers to 15-digits.
'When they entered an identity number over 15-digits long, the system automatically changed any digit after the 15th number to zero,' he said.
Based on data submitted to the commission in February by the Home Ministry, there are 190,463,184 eligible voters for the 2014 general election. Meanwhile, the KPU has 181,149,282 voters listed on its current provisional
voters list.
Husni also said that after matching the KPU data with that of the Home Ministry, the agency found that the data of around 115 million eligible voters could be deemed as valid.
He said the problem only affected the 65 million voters.
'We are now working on validating the identity numbers,' he said.
Earlier, election experts had warned that the ongoing transition from paper to electronic identification (e-ID) could wreak havoc with the 2014 election registration process.
The Institute of Economic and Social Studies and Development (LP3ES) said that based on the Home Ministry's data, only 134 million of a potential 184 million voters had received their e-ID cards.
The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said the KPU could delay the 2014 election due to the technical problem.
'The problem could be exploited by certain political parties for their advantage,' PDI-P deputy secretary general Andreas Pareira said, adding that the current problem could be a repeat of the voter list fraud fiasco in 2009.
Ahead of the 2009 general election an investigation found that out of a list of 1.2 million voters in East Java 345,000 (27 percent) were ineligible or fictitious voters.
Election watchdogs said the current glitch would likely cause a serious problem.
Titi Anggraini, Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem) executive director said there would be no issue should manual data, gathered by regional general elections committees, be deemed valid.
'According to the Law on the general elections, the validity of voters' data would be based on the manual database. So, if the problem lies with the online system, it will not affect the participation of the 65 million voters. The KPU [must] rectify them all,' she said.
Titi said the problem could have been solved if the KPU and the Home Ministry had compared their data earlier.
Based on Law No. 8/2012 (32) on the general elections, the Home Ministry should inform the KPU about the population data of each sub-district before submitting their eligible voters list to the commission. (koi)
