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community of volunteers has emerged on the back of a polarizing presidential race to safeguard the vote recapitulation process using methods that bring out the best of democracy.

Ainun Najib, an Indonesian IT expert residing in Singapore, was sick with the flu a day after the July 9 election, allowing him to monitor the outcome of the presidential election as it unfolded.

'€œWe needed alternative information to assist in monitoring the vote recapitulation process,'€ Ainun recollected, explaining the motivation behind kawalpemilu.org to The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

Kawalpemilu.org is a website that publishes a tabulation of vote recapitulation results originating from the General Elections Commission'€™s (KPU) website, kpu.go.id. These results are uploaded and updated on kawalpemilu.org servers every 10 minutes.

Ainun said that he started discussing the concept for Kawalpemilu with his friends on Thursday, July 10, a day after election day.

The next step was to recruit trustworthy volunteers willing to input data from 478,828 polling stations around the clock, he implied.

'€œWe extended the invitation to close friends through Facebook and asked them to seek out more people they trusted,'€ Ainun said.

The watchdog initiative started with a team of five and grew to a network of 700 volunteers as of last week, he revealed.

Ainun assured that Kawalpemilu volunteers were trustworthy.

Ainun said that the internal website could identify volunteers by their contributions, making it easy to suspend and blacklist anyone found to have falsified data.

'€œPsychologically speaking, whoever inputs data will think twice before they distort it,'€ he said.

Ainun also said that the Kawalpemilu website would be left to operate until it was no longer needed. He ensured that the website would run even if the official results from the KPU were brought to the Constitutional Court to be disputed.

Elisa Sutanudjaja, a web administrator for kawalpemilu.org, said recruitment and task distribution among the volunteers was very technology-oriented.

'€œTechnology was used as much as possible to organize the team. The distribution of tasks was very organic,'€ Elisa told the Post on Sunday.

Elisa, former employee of the Rujak Center of Urban Studies, said that volunteers were assigned to a number of different tasks, including social media account management, vote tallying, supervising and
KPU contact.

She said that voters also varied in age and background, some of whom were being chronicled on micro-blogging site Twitter by the official Kawalpemilu account, @kawalpemilu2014.

One tweet reads, '€œThere is a volunteer whose wife was currently undergoing chemotherapy in a hospital, but they still input data together.'€

'€œOur youngest volunteer is a 14-year-old middle school student, while our oldest is a 59-year-old pensioner,'€ Elisa revealed.

For security reasons, Elisa said that the identities of volunteers would be withheld, unless they gave their consent. She also said that the volunteers communicated with each other through a secret forum to ensure their anonymity.

Meanwhile, the website has been winning support from the public.

Liang, 54, said that the website enabled everyone to become instant observers of the election process, due to tabulation being clear and easy to follow.

'€œI'€™m very grateful for kawalpemilu.org. It basically leaves no excuse for supporters from either sides to pretend not to understand who has won this presidential election,'€ the Melbourne-based Indonesian graphic designer said. (tjs)