Just days before voters head to the polls, the technology whizzes at KawalPemilu have revived the independent election monitoring platform of bygone years, vowing to continue an initiative that has set an example for active civic participation in elections in the country.

The revival of the crowdsourcing platform was also partly sparked by concerns over the transparency over the new vote counting and tabulation tools that the General Elections Commission (KPU) wants to deploy for the 2024 general election.

Here’s what you need to know to help monitor the vote:

What is the KawalPemilu platform?

KawalPemilu is a mobile application and desktop software that uses crowdsourced data to create a projection of the presidential election, based on the official vote count tabulated at individual polling stations (TPS).

It was first launched in 2014 as a nonpartisan and independent way to help monitor that year’s presidential election, and was deployed again for the 2019 election.

The higher the number of users that upload the results at their respective polling stations, the clearer the picture becomes, and the harder misreporting the tally becomes. Anyone can sign up and monitor the vote counting after the polls close.

How does the reporting process work?

Once a user is signed up and logs in to the KawalPemilu website, all they need to do is stand by at their polling station until the result has been recorded on the the C.Hasil Salinan-PPWP form, and then take a photo of it with their smartphone.

The C.Hasil form is the certified report on the results of the manually counted votes at a polling station. Election workers then send these official returns to the appropriate regional KPU (KPUD) offices, where they are collated, checked and tabulated before they are submitted to the KPU for announcing the election results in March.

Users then need to get online and upload their photo of the second page of the C.Hasil form to the kawalpemilu.org website for the correct polling station. After that, users manually enter the tally provided on the photo into the appropriate field for each presidential pair, and then hit send.

KawalPemilu allows users the freedom to monitor the polling station of their choice and gives them the option to designate which polling stations they have committed to monitor.

Each C.Hasil form is usually posted publicly for all to see and has clear markers identifying which polling station it came from.

Why the sudden revival?

KawalPemilu announced last week on its @KawalPemilu_org account on X, formerly Twitter, that the crowdsourcing platform had been reactivated to allow members of the public to “participate in overseeing the vote count for the presidential election”.

“We initially saw no more need for KawalPemilu after seeing that the KPU’s Situs Hitung [vote counting platform] ran smoothly in 2019. But there has been no official word that [Situs Hitung] would be continued,” it tweeted.

“There was also no indication that the C.Hasil Salinan-PPWP would be disclosed to the public, as was the case in both 2014 and 2019. These two factors led KawalPemilu to the decision to take proactive measures” to encourage civic participation.

Commissioner Idham Kholik, who heads KPU’s technical division, recently told The Jakarta Post that election organizer would be switching from Situs Hitung (Situng) to the newer Sistem Informasi Rekap (Sirekap) official election tracker, first used in the 2020 regional elections, to keep tabs on the vote counting and official tally.

Idham maintained that the KPU would publish scanned images of the actual C.Hasil forms on its online elections tracker and dashboard, infopemilu.kpu.go.id, adding that local poll administrators (KPPS) would send PDF files of the form to election monitors at polling stations.

“So what we will be sharing are the images [of the C.Hasil forms] and interpretations of the numerical data,” he said. “Openness is the basis for using the Sirekap technology.”

Will it be enough to guarantee transparency?

While KawalPemilu cofounder Elina Ciptadi welcomed the KPU’s plan to open its tabulation site to the public, especially on the first day of vote counting, she still called on the election organizers to guarantee public access to the actual forms submitted by the polling stations.

“In the previous two elections, when the scans of the C1 forms [precursor to C.Hasil] were released to the public, it was able to limit or even dispel any doubt about the authenticity of the data,” she told the Post recently.

“KawalPemilu has operated since 2014 using authentic handw-filled [forms] by always presenting the scans or photos of the vote count reports from the polling stations next to the digitalized results. It’d be a shame not to continue such a good precedent [of transparency].”

M. Roland, a 31-year-old private sector employee who has been recruited as a local poll administration at a polling station in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, told the Post on Tuesday that the C.Hasil form would be “visible for all to see”, including both formal and informal election observers and monitors, as well as ordinary citizens.

“The process at the polling station is pretty clear and transparent, since most administrators are members of the local community,” Roland said. (tjs)

Editor’s note: Updated for clarity.

Popular

PDI-P will likely be part of opposition: Ganjar

Indonesia one step from Olympics after beating South Korea

Bahlil leads task force to boost sugar, bioethanol production in Papua