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ack of surveillance and vote rigging have turned polling stations into the front line in electoral fraud, politicians and observers have said.

Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) lawmaker Eva Kusuma Sundari said her party had witnessed in previous elections frequent violations, such as vote buying and the manipulation of vote counts, taking place in polling stations.

'€œVote buying, for example, can be achieved by bribing polling station staff, who then transfer votes for one candidate or political party to a rival,'€ Eva, who is running for re-election, told The Jakarta Post.

'€œIf a political party has no vote monitors at a polling station, there'€™s a good chance of internal vote transfers, which involve legislative candidates from the same party.'€

The only way to defeat such practices, Eva said, was to ensure that every legislative candidate recorded the original data presented in the vote recapitulation forms, locally known as C1 forms, in every polling station.

Before the 2009 general elections, political parties had the right to appoint their candidates for legislative seats based on the overall vote for the party. Today, individual legislative candidates compete directly against each other for their seats based on their own votes.

Great Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) Party deputy secretary-general Aryo Djojohadikusumo also stressed the importance of thorough surveillance of polling stations, especially the need to verify voters'€™ eligibility due to ongoing disputes over the national fixed voters list (DPT).

'€œMy campaign team, for example, recently found many dubious names, like '€˜Pocong'€™ and '€˜Kuntilanak'€™, in the DPT in my electoral district'€ said Aryo, referring to the names of two characters in traditional Indonesian ghost stories.

Aryo, a first-time candidate, is running for a legislative seat in the Jakarta-3 electoral district, which covers North Jakarta municipality, West Jakarta municipality and Thousand Islands regency.

In a recent interview with the Post, Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) deputy chief Bambang Widjojanto warned about intensifying vote-count manipulation in the upcoming elections after it had seized counterfeit C1 forms from a property belonging to graft suspect and former Constitutional Court chief justice Akil Mochtar.

The General Elections Commission (KPU) is currently organizing 545,778 polling stations across the country for the legislative and presidential elections next year. Each of them will be run by a maximum of seven polling station officers.

The director of Gadjah Mada University'€™s Center for Anticorruption Studies, Zainal Arifin Mochtar, said the Election Supervisory Committee'€™s (Bawaslu) limited human resources had left many polling stations, especially those located in remote areas, vulnerable to corrupt practices.

'€œBribing election committee officers is so much cheaper than throwing money at voters,'€ he said.