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ctivists from a group of NGOs revealed on Sunday the results of their research into the capacity and track record of legislative candidates for the House of Representatives (DPR), the election falls on April 9.

Their conclusions strengthen public sentiment '€” that the next group of legislators, at the national and regional levels, will be no more promising than the outgoing members who are generally perceived as corrupt and incompetent.

Despite the gloomy picture, the activists encouraged voters to use their constitutional rights and urged voters to scrutinize their choices. They also provided information on their websites about the candidates to help voters.

'€œWe need to encourage the public to be more active and to be smarter about voting in order to fulfill our vision and mission. One of the challenges is information accessibility,'€ Lia Toriana of Transparent International Indonesia (TII) told reporters in Jakarta on Sunday.

TII is also conducting research on legislative candidates by analyzing General Elections Commission'€™s (KPU) data, tracking media coverage of candidates and by conducting random interviews in electoral districts to find out whether or not they were deemed electable.

Sekar Ratnaningtyas, also from TII, said that '€œonly 100 out of the 400 legislative candidates that we have monitored are deemed electable'€.

Sekar said TII'€™s research only focused on legislative candidates under the age of 40 because one of the reasons there were so many undesirable candidates was because there was a large number of incumbents running again for the 2014 election.

Meanwhile, citing the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK) Sekar said that around 69.7 percent of the House during the 2009-2014 period were allegedly corrupt. The Home Ministry also found that 431 provincial council members and 998 municipality council members were implicated in legal issues, including corruption.

To encourage smarter voter participation, TII (checkyourcandidate.org), the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) pemilu.walhi.or.id and the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) bersih2014.net have conducted research on the candidates and displayed the results on their websites.

According to the NGOs'€™ studies, there are a low number of electable legislative candidates.

'€œFrom our studies, we can see that the quality of candidates is really bad,'€ Khalisa Khalid of Walhi told reporters.

According to Walhi, only 7 percent of the candidates for the House that they examined made environmental issues their priority.

Kontras deputy of strategy and mobilization Chrisbiantoro said his organization excluded the Gerindra Party and the Hanura Party, because the founders of the two political parties were closely linked to various human rights abuses during their service in the military. Gerindra was established by Lt. Gen. (ret) Prabowo Subianto, while Hanura was established by Gen. (ret) Wiranto.

Sadar Subagyo, a House member from Gerindra denied Kontras'€™ allegation. '€œWhat is much more important now is how to create job opportunities: you cannot just talk about human rights because there are no rights without responsibilities,'€ Sadar commented. (fss)