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ince the Reform Era began with the downfall of Soeharto in 1998, Indonesia has undergone a process of decentralization, with a concerted focus on handing greater power and representation to people living outside Java. This policy has been pursued to address concerns that wealth, power and development have largely been concentrated on Java at the expense of other regions, especially the more remote.

There is, however, one area of government where this general trend has not been evident: the presidential election. This is because the president is elected by popular vote, which, it can be argued, gives added weight to the interests of voters in Java, as it is by far the nation’s most populous island — home to roughly 144 million of the country’s 261 million people, according to 2017 Home Ministry data.

Perhaps as a result, Indonesia has had a distinct lack of presidential representation from outside Java. Since independence in 1945, only one president has come from outside Java: BJ Habibie, who took office simply because he was the vice president of then president Soeharto who stepped down in May 1998.

The 2019 election, as in 2014, will see two candidates from Java compete for the nation’s highest office.

Furthermore, the two provinces identified as strongholds of the two candidates, and from which their respective opponents have dedicated significant attention to drawing support, are Central Java for the incumbent Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and West Java for his challenger Prabowo Subianto. The reason for their interest in these two provinces is clear; Central Java has a population of more than 35 million, while West Java’s is more than 44 million.

By comparison, Sumatra and its surrounding islands have a population of 57.7 million, while all of Sulawesi is home to 20.2 million people. The least developed and most impoverished provinces trail far behind. East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) has a population of just over 5 million, West Papua roughly 1 million and Papua 4.2 million.

There are, however, alternatives to a strictly popular vote system.

In the United States, the Electoral College system gained a new level of attention after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The US Electoral College consists of 538 electors, with an absolute majority of 270 votes required to win an election. Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to the combined total of their representation in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

This means that larger states are given more Electoral College votes than smaller states, although votes in small states are certainly given added weight. During the presidential election, each state holds its own popular vote, with the electors then voting for the president on behalf of the state based on the outcome. All but two states implement a “winner takes all” rule, with the winner of the popular vote receiving all Electoral College votes from the electors. This rule, however, is not in the Constitution and is determined at the state level.

Critics of the system express frustration that an elected president can lose the popular vote, as was the case when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Advocates of changing the system to a national popular vote argue that the Electoral College is undemocratic and a relic of the 18th century. However, there is some merit in such a system, particularly for a country like Indonesia.

The US Electoral College is a central feature of its federalist system, in which the country is understood as a collection of independent states. The Electoral College system was designed to ensure the interests of people in each state were given weight in presidential elections.

Contemporary advocates of the system argue that it allows voters in smaller states to play a role and prevents the election system from becoming a fly-over democracy, in which presidential candidates could reasonably expect to win by focusing their campaigns and policies on the largest population centers to the detriment of the interests of people in less populated and rural areas.

However, even from this perspective the Electoral College is not without its faults. Harvard law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig argues the “winner takes all” rule has resulted in campaigns being focused on 14 “purple” battleground states.

As a compromise, Lessig has proposed a proportional allocation of Electoral College votes to correspond with the results of the popular vote in each state. This would encourage candidates to focus their campaigns and policies on a wider number of states. It would also help ensure people’s votes still count, even if their preferred candidate loses the popular vote in their state.

Nevertheless, critics of an electoral college system could still argue this fails to comply with the principle of “one person, one vote, one value”. The advantage of the Indonesian system is that citizens can vote directly for their leader, unlike indirect systems such as Germany, India, or my home country of Australia.

However, a proportional electoral college system could be weighted in such a way as to elevate the voices of voters in more remote and less developed regions of the country in a way that does not severely undermine the voting power of those in the densely populated provinces of Java.

If the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives is taken as a guide to how electoral college votes could be allocated, NTT would hold 13 (one per 412,282) and Papua 10 (one per 424,275). This would compare to West Java’s 91 (one per 483,948), meaning as a single province it would continue to hold significant sway in determining presidential elections, but that the interests of less populated provinces outside Java would be slightly elevated.

While the Republic of Indonesia was founded as a unitary state, and not a collection of states, as was the case in the founding of the US, the other central principle of Indonesia is “unity in diversity”. A proportional electoral college system could arguably do a better job of representing this diversity by elevating the voices of Indonesians across the archipelago, especially those in the remotest and least developed areas.
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