The General Elections Commission (KPU) said it would stick to its schedule to announce the result of the April 9 legislative election on May 9, despite mounting pressure on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to issue a regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) to allow the commission to extend the deadline.

KPU commissioner Ferry Kurnia Rizkiyansyah said the commission had no plans to extend the deadline, despite the fact that it had yet to complete vote tallies in 14 provinces.

'€œWe remain optimistic [that we can meet the deadline] looking at what we have done so far,'€ he said.

Ferry was responding to a call by election observers, who urged the KPU to meet with the President and request that he issue a Perppu to amend Law No. 8/2012 on general elections, which stipulates that the commission shall announce the result of a legislative election 30 days at the latest after election day.

People'€™s Synergy for Democracy in Indonesia (Sigma) director Said Salahuddin said the KPU risked producing an unconstitutional election result if it failed to meet the deadline.

'€œThis is a critical point. What would the world say if it saw that Indonesia could not even determine the result of its legislative election [on time]?'€ he told The Jakarta Post.

Salahuddin said he was extremely doubtful that the KPU would meet the deadline as it still had to tally votes from 14 provinces, some of which had sizable numbers of voters and electoral districts, such as East Java, West Java and North Sumatra.

He added that balloting and vote-counting in some of these provinces were likely to have been rigged.

The other provinces whose vote counts have not been completed are Bengkulu, East Kalimantan, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), Maluku, North Maluku, Papua, Riau, North Sulawesi, Southeast Sulawesi, West Sulawesi and South Sumatra.

In the case of North Maluku, the vote tally had been completed on Wednesday but the KPU failed to certify the results due to complaints from several political parties.

Contacted separately, Jimly Asshiddiqie, head of the Election Organizers Ethics Council (DKPP), said this year'€™s legislative election would see more violations than the 2009 poll due to stiff competition between candidates and vote-buying, as well as the absence of solid internal party systems.

'€œI predict that the number of violations, all kinds of violations, will be massive as all the legislative candidates worked on their own and used all necessary means, legal or illegal, to win their seats. They competed with one another both against candidates within the same party or against those from different parties,'€ he told the Post.

He also maintained that the existing majority vote mechanism had also contributed to the mess.

'€œBack in 2009, the majority vote mechanism was imposed suddenly, but now they have had five years to implement things better,'€ said Jimly, who was formerly the first Constitutional Court chief justice.

He was referring to a Constitutional Court ruling in December 2008, which imposed on the country the majority vote system or mechanism, in which legislative seats are awarded to those candidates who win the most votes, rather than being conferred on senior-ranking candidates in each party.

Meanwhile, the Elections Monitoring Agency (Bawaslu) said it would ask Yudhoyono to issue a Perppu to extend the deadline.

'€œBawaslu can do that because it is an election organizer, just like the KPU,'€ Salahuddin said.

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